Something Blue
by Hamhammer
Summary: An alternate perspective on a renegade Commander Shepard, why she fights, and what she lives and dies for. Spans from ME1 through ME3. FemShep/Liara pairing, non-explicit. Rated M for adult situations and just to be on the safe side.
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: Well, here goes nothing..._

_Welcome to Something Blue._

_I am quite a new author, I'm afraid. My fanfiction writing experience at this point consists of the single other fic that I posted here – Inaudible – and I honestly haven't the first **clue** what I'm doing. __If I let that stop me, however, I'd never learn anything new. So I'm flying blind here, hands firmly planted on the seat of my own proverbial pants while the metaphor train jumps off the rails and begins putting down its own track. Or something._

_Anyway._

_This is the first chapter of what will, with any luck, be a fic that covers shortly before the start of the first game until a bit after the end of the third game. I intend to stay fairly close to official canon in terms of actual events, although the **reasons** that those events occur may be wildly different here than in the original game. That's half the fun, after all. Consider it an... alternate approach to Renegade._

_Commentary, critique, cries of adulation, angrily thrown fruit, and shrugs of indifference are all welcome._

* * *

Lieutenant David Anderson was not in the best of moods. His SPECTRE candidacy had been called into serious question after the refinery on Camala was blown up by that _bastard_ Saren, he'd had to watch Khalee Sanders walk out of his life just after things were getting interesting, and to top it all off, somebody thought that he'd deserved a 'break' and handed him a do-nothing recruitment assignment ("Go play hero for the kids, Anderson! It'll be a great break!") in the slums of Earth as some sort of sick and twisted idea of a _reward!_

He ground his teeth in frustration as he sat stiffly in the chair before taking a long, calming breath. Like it or not, it was his job while the Council figured out what to do with him. He supposed he didn't exactly deserve a medal for letting that Turian stick him with the blame over the blown up refinery, but still, to be stabbed in the back like that-

He cut that train of thought short with a grimace. He had more pressing matters to consider, like the young girl who thought she'd been circumspect about eying the recruitment station. He sighed, and not for the first time that day. There had been lots of people checking out the station. Some just wanted to talk to a "hero of the Alliance, which he didn't mind. Others were young men and women looking to join up, which he was also okay with.

There were also a lot of kids trying to join. Some were on the run, some were fleeing from the police, and some were just trying to get away from the slums. The last kind were the worst of all, since the law was _very_ clear: You must be a citizen, you must not have any outstanding warrants for your arrest, you must not be a felon, you must be in good health, and you _must be of age._

There was no way in _hell _this girl was eighteen.

Not that he was an expert on the subject – he hadn't exactly had a lot of experience with underage women, after all. Still, some things stood out like a sore thumb, and this... _girl_ was one of them. No hips. Childlike proportions. Underdeveloped breasts. A too-thin frame carefully hidden by a cheap pair of cargo pants and baggy t-shirt. If he had to guess, he'd put her at fourteen or fifteen_._ Sixteen at the most, and that was being generous.

She double checked something on a small piece of paper in her hand, then nodded to herself and pushed the door open.

"Hello," she said in a clear, strong voice while he stared at her. "Is this the Systems Alliance Military recruitment station?"

He blinked and nodded politely. "Yes, miss, it is. Can I help you?"

She smiled at him – a funny, lopsided smirk that made her look even younger – and nodded. "Yeah. I want to sign up for the Navy."

He sighed. Of course she did. "Miss, you need to be eighteen years old to join the military on your own, or seventeen with parental permission," he explained gently.

Her lopsided smirk grew into a full grin. "But I am eighteen, mister..." her eyes flicked to his nametag, "sorry, Lieutenant Anderson. Ijust look young for my age."

Christ, he hated doing this. "Of course you do, miss. I take it you've just conveniently misplaced your birth records?" He looked up at her with a tired expression on his face.

She nodded, but began speaking before he could open his mouth to ask her to leave. "_No_, I don't have my original birth records. I _do_ have my national ID – will that work?" She cocked her head to the side, an inquisitive expression on her face.

He blinked. "Uh, yes, miss, that's allowed, but I'll need to run an extended check on it and confirm the biometrics," he said warningly. "We've had a lot of fake cards come through here, and all these young kids _think_ that the fakes are good enough to pass the checks. It's always sad when we have to run them in for identity fraud," he said, hoping she would catch the hint.

She didn't.

He winced when he saw the card she held out to him. _Hell, this thing's brand new,_ he thought to himself with a groan.

She spoke as if reading his thoughts. "I know it looks fake. It just got reissued. Age of majority, and all that," she said with a wave of her hand.

He sighed, outwardly this time, and stood, taking the card with him. "Alright, miss..." he glanced down at the freshly-imprinted plastic, "Shepard," he said. "I'm going to take this to the back and start the extended check. We can do the biometrics after that, if you're still interested." He slid the rolling chair back under the desk and started walking to the records room in the back of the small office.

Pausing at the door, he gave her a quick glance. _Please, girl, just run. Then I'll have a nice clean mystery on my hands, instead of having to arrest you for fraud..._

Catching his glance, she gave a small wave, and began searching through the MOS pamphlets on the desk. He shook his head and walked into the back room.

* * *

He walked out of the back room in a daze. Her ID has passed. How? He _knew_ she wasn't eighteen, there was _no way_ she was eighteen. He'd run the check three times. Hell, he'd even called up a technical buddy down at the local training center and had _him_ run the card. It passed there, too.

Which either meant that his intuition was _horribly_ wrong... or the system had been compromised. He wasn't sure which idea scared her more.

_Focus, David. You still have a girl that wants to join the military, and it's your job to help her do so._ He sighed to himself. _It's also your duty as a decent human being to see that she doesn't._ Hell. He was old enough to have _kids_ her age. It wasn't right.

"Alright," he said finally, pulling the rolling chair out and taking a seat while she stuffed the pamphlets back in the slot on the desk. "Your ID actually checks out. I apologize for any rudeness I may have offered, but we _do_ have a lot of underage kids trying to get in."

She nodded sympathetically. "I understand... sir?" she said the honorific cautiously, as if not quite sure she was using it properly. He shook his head. "You're not a recruit yet. Lieutenant Anderson if you want to be formal, David otherwise."

"Okay, Lieutenant Anderson," she nodded. "You can call me Elle, or Shepard. I go by both."

"About that... you don't have a first name?" he asked her. "It just says the letter 'L' on your card."

She shook her head. "The registry screwed up, and my parents thought it was too funny to fix," she said with a hint of disgust. "My name is _supposed_ to be Elle, ee ell ell ee, but the doctor heard it as just 'L'."

He smiled a little at that. He definitely knew how bureaucratic SNAFUs went. They were a fact of life in the military, where everything ran on paperwork, and nobody seemed to know why anything was set up the way it was, and _forget_ about trying to change it...

"So," she said, shaking him from his brief reverie, "how does this work? I mean, I've never joined the military before," she said with a nervous laugh.

"First," he said, his voice serious, "I don't suppose there's any way I can convince you to not do this? Extended checks or no, I'm almost certain that card isn't real, and I don't think you're eighteen." At her scowl, he continued with a sigh. "Legally, it checks out. I can't stop you from joining if that's what you want. However... I think it's wrong to send kids to war. Whatever problems you're having at home... joining the army isn't the solution," he said heavily. "It's a huge choice to make, and not something to make on a whim."

She looked at him, then. _Really _looked at him... and he found himself suddenly wondering where the little girl had vanished to.

Gone was the carefree, almost flirtatious demeanor of a young kid. Gone was brave act hiding a nervous child. Gone was the impression that she'd done something wrong and that she thought this was the best way out.

He swallowed as he met her striking green eyes partially hidden under a lock of red hair. They weren't the eyes of a young girl, not even a little. Not any more. No little suburban teenager _ever_ stared someone down like that. They were piercing, calculating, as cold as the blackest depths of space... and just as caring.

She gave herself a quick shake, then smiled at him, and the look was gone as if it had never been. "I'm sure it is, Lieutenant. I don't have much of a home to go back to, not really," she said a little sadly. "My parents died years ago," she explained. "I've been homeless since leaving the shelter."

_Homeless? That would explain the lanky look,_ he thought to himself, _and the small frame. Maybe she actually is eighteen? _He felt a weight ease on his shoulders. Well. Maybe he wouldn't be sending a kid off to war today, and might instead be giving a luckless young woman a chance to climb up in the world. He was almost happy... until he remembered the look she'd given him. _Yeah. Right. She's a poor, luckless young woman and you're a FNG fresh off the boat._ He sighed inwardly. _You can't keep her out on your gut,_ he reminded himself, _so get this over with._

"I'm sorry to hear that," he apologized. "and that would certainly explain why I thought you were underage." He smiled politely at her. "I saw you reading the pamphlets. Did you have an idea what branch of service you wanted to consider? The army has some comfortable groundside postings, and they're always in need of capable recruits," he suggested.

"Army? No, thank you," she shook her head. "I want to join the Navy. The marines."

He sighed inwardly again. It would figure.

"The marines are a tough bunch, you know," he said sternly. "I should know, I am one. It takes a _lot_ of work to cut it as a marine, and a certain level of physical capability that, frankly, I'm not sure if you have." The words weren't unkind, but neither were they gentle.

"I want to join the marines," she repeated stubbornly.

He held up his hands in a placating gesture. "Okay, but it's not that simple. You're going to need-" he began.

"-a strong score on the ASVAB, to pass the standard physical exam, to have no dependents, to have a passing rank in third-tier education, as well as meeting all the other requirements for joining the military," she counted off on her fingers.

He stared at her.

"I read the pamphlet," she said.

Oh. That made sense.

"Well. If you know the requirements..." he began and pulled out a data slate with the forms on it, "then I suppose we should start the paperwork?" The girl – he couldn't help but think of her as a girl, no matter what her ID said – nodded slowly.

"Okay. You don't have a criminal record – that came up on the extended ID check already," he explained at her raised eyebrow, "– so we can skip that step." He tapped a couple boxes, signed his name, and flicked the digital form pad to the next page. "Now, I you're going to need to schedule a time to take the tests as well as go through a physical. We can put that on the calendar now, if you'd like," he offered.

"The sooner, the better," she said.

His eyes narrowed. "Are you in trouble?"

She shook her head. "No. I've been preparing for this for a while. I'd like to get going with it." She gave a small shrug and looked back at the form. "When's the first available date?"

Still scowling, he checked the calendar. "The twenty-third, so... about two weeks from now," he said. "It's held downtown, in the main recruitment center. Do you want to take the practice exam first? It can be a good way to figure out if you need more time to study," he asked.

"No. I already took it twice at the library. It's not really that difficult," she said with a combination of pride and scorn.

He chuckled. "Welcome to standardized testing, Shepard. Will you need a ride? I can arrange to have you picked up, if you'd like."

"No. I'll take the bus... or walk," she said with a slight grin. "The exercise'll be good practice, anyway."

He nodded and marked down her name and intent to take the tests. "Okay. 0800 – that's eight AM," he said as an afterthought, "at the main recruitment center. The address is on the pamphlet," he said as he handed her a a sheet. "Normally, we try to talk to a potential recruit a lot, figure out what the right job is for her, but since you seem set on the Marines we'll move straight to figuring out if you qualify. If you pass the tests, we can talk about things like signing bonuses, potential jobs, and the like, but I don't want to get your hopes up early, and we're supposed to close soon."

She nodded, standing and tucking the proffered pamphlet into the pocket of her cargo pants. He stood with her, and walked her to the door.

"One last thing," he said quietly. "if you don't show up, nothing bad happens – you can always reschedule. If at any time, you change your mind, just come back here and talk to me or comm me, we can pull you off the test."

"Thank you, Lieutenant Anderson," she said with a ghost of a smile, "but somehow, I doubt that'll happen."

With that, she stepped out of the door.


	2. Chapter 2

_A/N: While I'm aware that "chat/script format and keyboard dialogue based entries" are against the rules, if Dostoyevsky can get away with an entire **book** of them I figure I can probably sneak half a chapter in. Also, have I mentioned that the automatic removal of things formatted like an e-mail address or filename is obnoxious? Because it's obnoxious._

* * *

_To: Daniel Weathers_

_From: Alice McDermott_

_Subject: Group 12a Medical Evaluations_

_Body:_

_Dan,_

_We've finished the medical tests. This batch is better than most, but if even half of them are over eighteen I'll eat my medical license. They all have very nice fresh and new looking documentation that proves they're of age, of course, but even accounting for malnutrition in the street kids there's no way in hell they're all legal. I know their ID passes the extended check, but I want it on file that I'm not buying it._

_One of the recruits, calls herself Shepard, made one of the recruiters a little uneasy. He asked Jason to have a talk with her – you know how disarming he can be – and he ran through some of the standard psych eval questions. Raised some red flags. Pretty much all of them, in fact. Normally that means somebody's gaming the test, but Jason thinks it's real. This would mean that she'd be an instant scrub and we'd be recommending a lot more, except for two things:_

_First, she's piqued Jason's curiosity, and you know how he is about interesting projects. He's been dragging his feet on the paperwork something fierce. I almost asked him if his dog ate it after the fifth excuse this afternoon._

_Second... She scans for biotic potential. A **lot** of potential. More than anyone I've seen, including most of the asari tutors we have on staff. If that turian hadn't gotten killed over at BAaT I'd have already recommended her as a candidate, red flags or no._

_On a separate note, IT still hasn't been out to fix the database front end yet, so I've attached the test results to this message for your perusal. Let me know if you have any questions. Assuming there aren't any problems and Jason stops indulging himself, we should have a final pass/fail list for you by Friday when the lab work comes back._

_Yours,_

_Alice McDermott_

_Attached file: 12a initial medical review_

_Attached file: 12a psychological evaluation eshepard_

_Attached file: 12a supplemental interview eshepard_

* * *

_To: Alice McDermott_

_From: Daniel Weathers_

_Subject: Re: Group 12a Medical Evaluations_

_Body:_

_Alice, thanks for the heads up. Greg tells me that the database stuff should be sorted out soon, so we won't need to mail this stuff back and forth. It's the fucking 22nd century, this stuff should just **work**._

_Your concerns about the age of the recruits are noted. Standing policy from Up High, however, is that the new ID system is unhackable and if they pass the extended verification test and a medical evaluation then they're in. A more suspicious mind might suspect that they made the system intentionally insecure in order to boost recruitment numbers with impressionable underage kids, but as a responsible administrator and sensible soldier I'm above such paranoid imaginings._

_I don't have time to go over this Shepard's tests right now, but I'll take a copy home and look at it over the weekend._

_-Dan_

* * *

_To: Alice McDermott_

_From: Daniel Weathers_

_Subject: Elle Shepard_

_Body:_

_Just read the files and transcript._

_**DO NOT SCRUB HER.**_

_I've called the folks over at the N program, and they're sending down a couple of psychologists and recruiter of their own. Make sure she doesn't go anywhere. If she tries to leave, stop her. If she starts whining about her rights, call Zeke over at the 43rd precinct office and have him hold her for me on the usual gang charges. He owes me a favor._

_Jason can ask questions if he wants, but make sure he knows that she's worth more than he is right now and if anything happens I will personally see him hung, drawn, and quartered. I'll tell him too, but in case he doesn't check his mail before he gets working on Monday let him know for me._

_-Dan_

* * *

_To: Jason Wells_

_From: Daniel Weathers_

_Subject: Elle Shepard_

_Body:_

_Jason, make sure you don't spook Shepard. I've got a call out to two folks from the N program who I think will want to talk to her. I don't know if you've read the medical reports Alice did, but she's a more powerful biotic **without** an amp than most of the L1s._

_-Dan  
_

* * *

_To: Daniel Weathers_

_From: Jason Wells_

_Subject: Re: Elle Shepard_

_Body:_

_I won't spook her. If anyone's getting spooked talking to her, it's me. Her world view is creepy as hell, and before you ask, yes, that's my professional opinion. You can even put the wording in your report._

_I'll leave a copy of my interview notes on the server – Greg got it working again – and on your desk. Make sure that whatever N suit shows up to talk to her reads them first, okay? You do **not** want to be bullshitting her, Dan. I cannot stress that enough._

_-J._

_P.S. We still on for beers this weekend?  
_

* * *

_To: Jason Wells_

_From: Daniel Weathers_

_Subject: Re: Re: Elle Shepard_

_Body:_

_Just be careful, alright? If potential biotics like her were one in a million I'd be literally jumping for joy._

_And yes, we're still on for beers. There's a new English-style brewpub that opened up near my place, thought we'd give it a try._

_-Dan_

* * *

_To: Daniel Weathers_

_From: Jason Wells_

_Subject: Re: Re: Re: Elle Shepard_

_Body:_

_Sounds good. See you on Saturday._

_-J._

* * *

The classic brewpub was an interesting beast. Part commercial brewery, part restaurant, and part simple bar. While there was great variety of what you could find in a given brewpub, there were a few consistencies between them, at least in the North American region: The food was always greasy and delicious, the beer was always above average and expensive, and the clientele was usually less boorish and obnoxious than your average bar denizen.

To Major Daniel Weathers it was a vast improvement over the trashy bars that Jason seemed to favor. He didn't feel like he needed to constantly watch his wallet, or inspect his food for errant critters before taking a bite. The décor wasn't bad, either, even if he thought the retro-industrial look was a little bit over the top.

He'd taken a customary bench seat in a corner for privacy's sake – while they were both technically off-duty, he and Jason had a longstanding tradition of discussing the goings-on at work over drinks. None of the material they discussed was exactly classified, per se, but some of it might be considered a privacy concern if anyone was listening in knew where he worked. _Hence the back booth,_ he thought to himself as he sipped his beer.

The heavy door to the pub rattled and he saw the thin frame of Jason Wells step inside. He gave a small wave, and gestured to the seat across from him.

Jason sat down with a long sigh and tossed his hat next to him before leaning back in the seat and closing his eyes.

"Long day?" Daniel asked, grin on his face.

"You have no idea," Jason replied, leaning forward to rest his elbows on the table and rub his eyes. "The server broke again literally an hourafter we got in to work today, so we're doing all the approval paperwork by hand and mailing – _mailing – _it off. If we get these recruits shipped out on schedule it'll be a miracle," he said.

"So, basically, everything's going like normal," he said with a straight face.

"Pretty much," he nodded absently, squinting at the drink menu above the bar. "What's good?"

Daniel tapped his glass, full of a nearly black thick beer. "The stout's pretty nice. Smoky. The bitter is _really_ bitter, but good anyway. The amber's a bit light. Haven't tried the IPA yet, but heard it's strong."

"If I drink anything strong, I'll just pass out," he groaned. "I'll try the amber. Back soon."

Dan waited comfortably, nibbling absently on the chips he'd ordered while Jason headed for the bar. They were real chips, cut from actual whole potatoes, not extruded from a ground-up paste like most were these days. _Of course, they have a price to match, _he mused, _but what's the point of earning a decent salary if all you do is give it to your kids when you finally kick the bucket?_

His idle reflections were interrupted by Jason's return with a full pint of golden ale, and Dan raised his eyebrows at the man. "You know, if you drink it in pints, it's going to put you to sleep no matter _what_ beer you order," he said teasingly.

Jason rolled his eyes. "Yeah, yeah, dad, whatever. It's been a long week." He settled into the seat and took a long drink from the glass, then looked up in surprise. "Hey, this is pretty good!"

"That's what happens when you don't get beer at crappy dive bars," Dan said.

"Pff. You just don't appreciate the unique atmosphere."

"You mean the garbage on the floor? No, not really." He shook his head. "How'd that business with Shepard go? I never got a full answer about what happened after I sent the N recruiters over to your office."

He grimaced and set the beer down on his coaster, giving a quick glance around him to make sure nobody was listening in. "They pulled her aside and talked to her in private for most of Tuesday afternoon. Threw the evaluation schedule all to hell. They said something to Alice that had her pissy for the whole week."

"She's normally pretty calm, unless..." he trailed off.

"Unless someone tries to interfere with her job. You want my guess? I think they told her to pass Shepard despite all the warnings and being, like, fifteen kilos underweight."

He nodded. "That would explain the transfer request I got."

Jason blinked in confusion. "Transfer request?"

"Yeah, one of those 'our station is over capacity, can you process this recruit' deals. They're not that common with recruitment as low as it's been, so I was a little suspicious." He sighed. "I checked out the details, and he's got a 'random training itinerary' that happens to _exactly_ match Shepard's."

Jason's face lit up in understanding. "He's a plant. She's being watched."

Dan nodded. "That's what I figure. Jason, you've been talking to her a lot, what the hell is going on? I know she's a biotic candidate, and frankly, that's why I called the N folks down here – with BAaT gone, they're the best people to talk to for biotic training – but everyone's acting like she's a time bomb."

He let out a long, explosive breath. "You want the truth?" He shook his head. "I think she's a psychopath," he said slowly. "Like, an honest-to-god, clinical psychopath. A _biotic_ psychopath. Hell, she's got an element zero nodule in her brain about the size of a fucking _walnut._"

Dan flinched. "How the hell is she not riddled with tumors?"

Jason shrugged. "No clue. It's probably wrapped in all kinds of glial tissue, or something. Point is, it's stuck smack dab in the middle of the ventrimedial prefrontal cortex, near the amygdala."

"Jason, I'm not a doctor," Dan reminded him, not for the first time.

"Right, right. Uh, that's the part of your brain responsible for – among other things – fear, anxiety, guilt, and empathy." He shook his head again. "She doesn't feel shame, or fear, or remorse, or regret, or _anything _like that."

Dan looked at the doctor in horror. "And the N program wants her to go through basic with all the other recruits?

He nodded grimly. "Yeah. They want to make sure she's 'sufficiently stable,' or something."

"But they're not idiots, so they're assigning her a watcher." He sighed. "Okay, that makes sense. What's your take on her? I mean, is this a train wreck waiting to happen?"

"Jesus, I don't know." He rubbed his eyes tiredly, and took a long drink of his beer. "It's a good thing she's smarter than I am."

Dan looked at him skeptically. "Jason, you have an IQ of a hundred and fifty-"

"One hundred and forty two," he interrupted.

"Fine, whatever. You have two doctorates. Do you really think she's smarter than you are?"

Jason sighed. "Intelligence is hard to quantify. I know a lot. I'm fast at getting from step A, through steps B, C, and D, to the conclusion at step E. I have a good memory." He stated these things as simple facts, with no boasting in them. "Shepard... she does similar things, but it's... faster, sort of. Colder, definitely. She knows she doesn't feel what we do. That's rare in psychopaths. So is patience."

He paused for a moment, collecting his thoughts. "It's good that she's smarter than I am, because it means she's _curious_ about the world. She reads. She plays the violin, did you know that?" Dan shook his head. "She likes learning new things. She knows that she can't get what she wants by ignoring the rest of humanity, so she willingly works with us, despite not caring about us."

He closed his eyes as he thought back to the interview. "I spoke to her at length, you know. When I left that interview room... I think I finally understand what it's like to be a specimen on a microscope slide. Peered at by a being greater than I ever will be." He gave a small shiver and drained his mug.

"You want my take on her, Dan?" He put his empty glass down and opened his eyes, looking his friend straight in the eye. "She'll do fine. She'll be a great soldier, and I'll cheer her on from the sidelines... and pray that she _never_ looks my way."

"Imma get another beer," he said after a long silence, and stood.

"Get me one, too," Dan said.


	3. Chapter 3

_A/N: My unofficial editor warned me that this chapter probably warrants a trigger warning. I didn't even know what a trigger warning **was**. I had to look it up. So... yeah. Trigger warning for rape. **No**, there isn't any rape, but the topic is discussed, and candidly enough to make me consider the warning polite._

_Chronologically, this happens before the previous chapter – the previous day, in fact. I wasn't sure I wanted to include it, which is why the bar scene comes first in the chapter order. Also, note that this is NOT the entire interview – merely a snippet from one of the later sessions. I'm not sure if I can do the whole thing justice with my current level of writing skill, so it'll probably turn up in bits and pieces over the course of the story to provide background._

_Hell. I'm still not sure if I want to post it... oh, well. NO FEAR, NO REGRETS!_

* * *

Doctor Jason Wells led the small, short-haired woman into the gaily-decorated interview room and shut the door behind him. Gesturing politely at the chair across him, he took his coat off and hung it on one of the pegs by the door while she made herself comfortable.

Taking his own seat, he set a small recorder on the table, nodded at the girl, and tapped the activation key. Smiling at her, he spoke clearly and carefully into the device. "Topic: Interview with L. Shepard, session four. Interviewer is Doctor Jason Wells. Date is Thursday, May 4th, 2170. Starting time is 0907."

She glanced at the small box curiously. "You do that every time we start. Wouldn't it be simpler to have the recorder keep track of all of that?"

He nodded, adjusting his chair as he did so. "It does. The slate – sorry, the verbal identification – is there just in case the file gets mislabeled somewhere," he explained.

"Oh. I see."

He cleared his throat at the pause. "So, continuing from yesterday... we agree that you don't have any real qualms about killing. Why haven't you left a trail of bodies behind you?" He asked, with a small grin.

She didn't return the smile, instead tilting her head at him with slightly narrowed eyes. "I don't know. Why haven't you raped me?"

He sputtered, nearly spewing his coffee over the recorder. "_What?_" he almost shouted.

She shrugged. "It's a fair question. I'm young, female, attractive, and I _know_ you find me interesting," she said with a slight gleam in her eye.

"Shepard – L – I would never, _ever_ do such a thing! It would be wrong on so many levels, for so many reasons-" he stammered.

"Pretend," she said coldly. "Let's say you're the kind of person who would. What's stopping you?"

"I... well, you're a gang kid. I know you can fight pretty well," he began hesitantly.

She nodded at him. "Good, that's good. I'd try to stop you, so you could be hurt trying it. What else?" her tone was demanding, and he almost flinched at the command in it.

"Uh... I'm not sure I'm comfortable with this line of questioning..." he trailed off at her icy glare.

"You started it," she said finally. "What else is stopping you?" she repeated.

"I... dammit," he swore. "Well, I'd have to make sure you didn't talk, somehow," he offered.

She nodded again. "Good. You'd have to ensure my silence... and there's no guarantee that you could do that. What else?"

"Uh, I'd have to hide the... evidence," he squirmed slightly at the phrase.

"There are other doctors here, and people I speak with besides you. Any rape would definitely leave marks," she said with a self-assured smile. "What else?"

He thought for a moment, then shrugged helplessly. "There are security monitors... uh, this recording... periodic audits... I'd have to fake all of those, too," he suggested.

"Difficult, and you might get caught," she acknowledged. "What else?"

He cast his mind about, not used to putting himself in the mind of that kind of person. "Um... there are guards here. They'd probably notice me acting differently, I guess..." he said tentatively.

"Good. It's fairly difficult to rape me, then," she said, evidently satisfied with the list. "What do you get out of it?"

He flinched at the question. "I- nothing! It's a horrible thing to do!" he said in protest.

"Pretend, remember," she reminded him sternly.

"I... Jesus." He put his head in his hands for a moment, before speaking to her through his palms. "Okay. Okay. I get... a short bit of pleasure," he said in a muffled and disgusted tone.

She nodded at him, despite him stuffing his eyes into his palms. "Right. What are the consequences if you're caught?" she asked.

He gave a short and bitter laugh. "I'm arrested, charged, convicted, and imprisoned for a good part of my life. I'm never allowed to work with children again. I spend years in therapy. My career is gone, my friends all leave, and my family refuses to talk to me."

She smiled at the blunt answer. "Is that worth fifteen minutes of pleasure?"

"_No!_"

"Now you know why I haven't 'left a trail of bodies behind me,' Doctor Wells," she said.

He sighed and took his face out his hands. "Because it's not worth it," he said flatly.

She grinned at him, all teeth and malice. "Exactly. People aren't willing to work with you if they think you'll kill them when they're no longer immediately useful. If you _do_ kill people, you have to hide the body, and even then you have to make sure nobody suspects that you did it. Even so, if they were associated with you, there are often lots of questions by people whose job it is to find out the truth."

He gave a derisive snort. "I have a hard time believing that fear of the law stops you."

She shook her head, pausing while she thought of a better word. "Not fear... understanding," she said at last. "The chances of getting caught are high, the consequences are harsh, and the short-term gain is minimal." She gave a small shrug, as if finding her own answer not terribly satisfying, but at least realistic.

"I see," he said dryly.

"However..." she said in a warning voice.

He raised an eyebrow at her."Yes?"

"There are ways to kill people without being held responsible. Let's examine that rape idea again, " she said.

"I'd rather not."

She ignored his protest. "Let's pretend I wanted to see you dead, Doctor. I could kill you, in which case I'd be arrested and likely executed, or at the very least locked away for the rest of my life – a locked psych ward is still a prison, after all."

"I'm so glad you think killing me is a bad idea," he said, rolling his eyes.

"Oh, but that would only be if I jumped you with a knife, or something stupid like that. No, if I wanted to kill you now..." she pursed her lips, thinking, then gave him a cold smile. "I would knock you out, rape you, beat myself up as best I could, then kill you."

He tucked his head in his palm, finishing her plan for her. "...and go running, claiming that I'd raped you, and 'accidentally' break the recording devices on the way out. Jesus." He shook his head.

Shepard began talking in a perky, news reporter voice, as if telling a story. "The poor girl is examined, and sure enough, they find your sperm in her, along with signs of a struggle. Your friends and coworkers remember that you showed an unusual interest in her case. A jury of sympathetic peers deems the killing self defense, and she's given therapy and state support for the rest of her life, while the military has to do a whole bunch of stuff to stop evil rapist doctors."

He sighed. "I hope you're not planning on doing anything like this, Shepard."

She shook her head. "No. Why should I? You're just curious about me, and I have no reason to believe that you mean me harm or want to stop me from pursuing my goals."

"What if you did?" he asked suddenly.

"I'm sorry?" she tilted her head, not understanding.

"What if you _did_ think that I wanted to stop you?" he clarified.

She gave him an empty smile and met his eyes, showing absolutely nothing. "Take a guess, Doctor," she offered quietly.

He shuddered. "...right. I think we're done for today. End interview session four, date, May 2nd, 2170. Time... 0916."

* * *

Back in his office, Doctor Jason Wells locked his door and collapsed into his chair. He stat there, unmoving in the dark room for a full five minutes before giving a long sigh and opening his desk drawer. From the back left corner, tucked behind a file on evacuation procedures that he'd never bothered to read, he pulled a small flask with a slightly trembling hand. He took a generous swig of the fiery contents within before capping it and putting it back, then started up his terminal and opened a new document.

_Memo: Changes in interview policy for recruits undergoing psychological evaluation, for immediate dissemination to all medical team members..._

The typing went on in the unlit office for nearly half an hour.


	4. Chapter 4

_A/N: First, I want to thank all the reviews and commentary I've gotten so far – it's more than I expected, given how new I am at this, and it's greatly appreciated :)_

_The basic training here is (roughly) based on the united states basic training program, mostly because I have a friend in the army who was able to tell me some of the things they put him through. They won't all come up here, but they'll be referenced later._

_The name of the general IS a shout out, but that's as far as the similarities go._

* * *

Basic training was a huge change for Shepard. Things that she had previously accepted as normal were unheard of, and things that she'd previously considered commonplace were unacceptable – and even illegal.

Take the food, for example. The tenth street reds were a tiny gang by most standards, numbering only a few dozen individuals scattered over a couple blocks. They were less a criminal organization and more a group banding together for survival. Unfortunately, aside from the random burglary, they didn't have much in the way of income... and since almost none of the Reds had jobs, that meant that food was quite scarce."Fend for yourself" was the truly the name of the game.

Shepard had learned at a very young age what you could and couldn't eat of the things that people threw out. Meat was rare, since by the time you came across it, it was usually bad – and eating bad meat was a great way to end up dead. Foul smell and maggots in meat were a sign of opportunity missed – leave it for the flies and move on. Fruit and vegetables, however, were a different story. Most fruit molds and the like wouldn't hurt you, even if they tasted foul, and a fermented fruit wasn't half bad, considering.

Those were the easy parts to identify, however. With limited running water, you had to be very wary of fresh-looking fruit and vegetables – oftentimes, they were drenched in pesticides and other chemicals that would make you nearly as sick as eating bad meat, with nastier long term effects. Finding an intact apple with a worm in it was actually a good sign: It meant that the apple wasn't drenched in pesticides, and the worm was effectively free protein.

In boot camp, the food was plentiful and safe, and nobody thought twice about snagging an apple from the bin. She'd been suspicious at first, and her fellow recruits had even laughed at her for washing the apple in the drinking fountain for three minutes before taking a bite. Once she'd figured out that it _wasn't_ the same crud that turned up in the few grocery stores near the Red's turf, she'd eaten so much that she'd barely been able to walk to her cot.

She'd had more than just long term starvation as a reason for being hungry, as well. The minimum physical standards for entering the military were quite clear, and it was only with the exemption offered by the N program headhunters that she'd been able to get in at all. Their pass on entering didn't get her out of the physical requirements, however, and a malnourished fifty-one kilogram girl trying to carry a twenty-five kilogram rucksack on top of a fifteen-kilogram suit of armor was an impossibility... unless you cheated.

Which she did. Vigorously. Not by taking out gear, or lightening the load, but with biotics: Without an amplifier, she couldn't generate a field strong enough to use as any kind of weapon... but she _could_ lift about twenty kilograms. So she did her marches, and her training, and her exercises while carefully holding her bag off her back for hours on end. That energy didn't come free, of course, and she finished each day exhausted to the bone and starving. It was all worth it when she – much to her evaluators' surprise – passed all of the physical tests, avoiding the Fitness Training Company.

Another aspect of military life that had taken her a good bit of getting used to was hygiene. The Red's ramshackle camp hadn't had a functional water heater or even proper running water much of the time, so showers and baths had been very much a "catch as catch can" operation. Combine that with a veritable rat's nest of salvaged goods and dark corners, and the entire Red camp was crawling with parasites and vermin of all kinds: fleas, mosquitoes, ticks, bedbugs, rats, roaches, you name it, it was there. Personal hygiene became simultaneously very important and very difficult.

As a concession to this, almost every member of the reds were clean-shaven and as hairless as possible: not only did it cut down on the number of places where various stowaways could hide, it minimized the time one spent in the showers when they _did_ manage to get enough water for one.

The twice-a-day _warm_ showers available to recruits in training were, to Shepard, one of biggest luxuries she'd ever experienced. Good food came along now and then, even in the Reds, but one _never_ had consistent access to warm running water and soap. She quickly became known among her fellow recruits for being the first one into the showers in the morning and the last one out before breakfast.

Other parts of boot camp weren't so pleasant. Shepard had grown up knowing that the only person really looking out for herself was her, and when she'd found that she would have to relinquish _all_ her weapons, she very nearly refused. Only a reminder that she'd be back out on the streets if she didn't made her do it, and even then it was with no small amount of trepidation that she'd handed over her knives, shiv, garrote, slingshot, and brass knuckles. The poor man she'd been turning her gear in to had nearly pissed himself when she'd lifted the old, shell-using sawed-off shotgun from down one pants leg and set it angrily in front of him. Only a quick word from the N7 program recruiter that had tagged along for her induction into basic training had prevented her arrest then and there when she dumped four different illegal weapons in the box for disposal.

Sleeping in a barracks had been nearly impossible at first. She'd spent her whole life sleeping lightly – a sound sleeper on the streets could easily find themselves never waking up – and what rest she did catch with the Reds she only got after making sure that she had at least five ways to stop someone from sneaking up on her. Being crammed in a barracks with twenty something other recruits was nerve-wracking enough; being crammed in with twenty something other _absolute strangers_ with _no weapons_ was jarring enough to make getting a good night's rest a serious ordeal.

Much to her irritation, her drill sergeant had noticed the circles under her eyes... and the remedy for sleeplessness in recruits was much the same as it was for being "too scrawny": More make-work. She'd spent hours carrying huge rubber tires from outdated ground transports from one side of camp to the other, only to get a snickering order from a conveniently new sergeant that there was no reason they should be moved in the first place, and that she should immediately take them all back where she found them. She had seethed at the obvious shell game... but when she'd actually slept soundly for the first night since arriving, she'd grudgingly admitted that it had worked. To herself only, of course. She would never give her taskmasters the satisfaction.

Hand-to-hand combat training had left her frustrated, as well. Shepard's weapon of choice in the Tenth Street Reds had been an old sawed-off shotgun that fired actual gunpowder-carrying shells, and failing that, a set of knives. Being forced to _unlearn_ all the techniques she'd used to fight with her entire life to swing a giant padded bat around had gotten her screamed at by drill sergeants with halitosis far more than she'd have preferred.

It was made worse by the combat training that they taught: Swinging heavy pugil sticks required a lot of upper body strength that, despite her rapidly developing musculature, she simply didn't have. Even with her underpowered biotics adding extra mass to her blows, she still ended up knocked clean on her behind more often than any other recruit there.

In the end, she'd picked up enough of it to squeak through it, but resolved when she finally got out that her first order of business was going to be replacing all the knives she'd had to give up before arriving at basic training. Hitting people with the butt of a rifle or a bayonet was all fine and good for hundred-kilo twenty year old men, but for _totally honestly eighteen_ malnourished women, it didn't work so well.

She'd also grown to loathe the "battle buddy" system. As a rule, Shepard didn't trust anybody farther than she could throw them... and at sixty three centimeters and fifty-one kilograms, she was hard pressed to throw anyone _anywhere_, even accounting for her non-amplified biotics. Being forced to go everywhere with some too-cheerful recruit that was twice her size and seemed far too comfortable in boot camp did nothing to put her mind at ease, and she'd nearly snapped at him twice before remembering that the polite, slightly nervous girl she was pretending to be wouldn't have threatened to gut somebody over not letting her walk to the bathroom by herself.

Still, she'd endured more irritating things in the past... and in far less favorable conditions, to boot. The work was still hard, the people were still generally idiots, the rules were still arbitrary, and the training was still something that a trained monkey could do in its sleep. It was boring, exhausting, and often aggravating... but Shepard endured. With gritted teeth and clenched fists, perhaps, but she still endured. The hours turned into days, the days into weeks, until – faster than she would have though possible, and far slower than she could imagine – she was standing outside the office of the N program recruiters in her newly pressed and _very_ itchy dress uniform.

* * *

The massive soldier snapped a quick salute before standing formally at attention. "Lieutenant Geoffrey McAllister, reporting as ordered, sir," he said respectfully.

Admiral Steven Hackett nodded at the somber-faced young soldier before him and smiled. "At ease, Lieutenant," he said in his gravelly voice, gesturing at the overstuffed chair in his office. "Have a seat."

The young marine relaxed, nodding his thanks as he settled gently before the admiral. "Thank you, sir. You asked to see me?"

He nodded. "How was basic the second time around?" he asked with an amused smile.

The soldier didn't quite grin, but it was close. "Interesting. It's funny how fast they go from pimply-faced kids to... well, not soldiers, but..." he trailed off, searching for words.

Hackett nodded in understanding. "Potential ones."

Geoffrey echoed the nod. "Yes, sir, exactly. They're not great yet... but they could be."

"I know what you mean," Hackett said wryly. His rise from the ranks of enlisted men was near-legend among the troops under his command.

"Still, as interesting as the experience was, it's not why I sent you there," he said, the humor vanishing from his voice. Geoffrey straightened unconsciously in the chair at the admiral's tone.

"You wanted me to keep an eye on Shepard," he said.

"Yes," the admiral confirmed. "Normally we send potential biotics to BAaT, but with that program shut down and the ascension project not quite rolling yet, we've made do with tutors," he explained with a dismissive wave of his hand. "Shepard's case is... unique, however, and it was decided that sending her through normal boot camp was necessary, despite the risks."

"Risks, sir?" McAllister looked at the admiral, confused.

"You were told to guard her from harm and watch her actions as often as possible, Lieutenant. I've read your formal report, but I'd like to get your personal impressions. It's... important," he said quietly.

The young lieutenant scowled, thinking. "I don't know, sir. She's remarkably controlled. She didn't sleep well the first few weeks, but got over it pretty quickly. Kept to herself most of the time, seemed a little on the shy side." He gave a helpless shrug. "I put everything in the report, sir. Nothing really out of the ordinary."

"Nothing at all?" the admiral pressed, blue eyes intent. "No little things that bothered you?"

Geoffrey's scowl deepened. "Well... I still don't know how she hauled her rucksack around. It had to be nearly as heavy as she was, but I never saw her try to cheat the weights."

Hackett gave a small chuckle. "You've heard the phrase 'never judge a book by its cover,' lieutenant?" Geoffrey nodded, confused. "Well, never judge a woman's strength by her size. You'll be wrong more often than you're right."

"I'll keep that in mind, sir," he said respectfully.

"That's it, though?" Hackett pressed again. "Nothing else?"

"Sir, what's going on? My report-"

"Was perfectly clear, I know. I trust your judgment, McAllister," he said, using the young lieutenant's name for the first time. "I want _your_ opinion, the little things you might have left out of the report, the bits you can't justify writing down."

"I-"

"If there aren't any, there aren't any. That's fine, too. I just want you to tell me if there are any parts that you might have hesitated to put in because of how they might sound. That's all." He leaned back in his desk and eyed the lieutenant levelly.

Geoffrey, to his credit, thought long and hard. "Nothing that wasn't in there already, sir, I'm sorry," he said finally, shaking his head.

Hackett nodded slowly before smiling politely at the young man. "Thank you, Lieutenant. That will be all."

"Sir," Geoffrey stood at attention and snapped a salute before turning and leaving the room, closing the door behind him with a soft click.

Alone in the office, Hackett let out a long sigh. He reached for his desk communicator, punching in the the number for the N program recruitment office.

"Carter, this is Hackett," he said somberly. "She passed. Go ahead and make the offer."

* * *

"-ake the offer," Shepard heard faintly from inside the office. She'd been told it would be a "short wait" nearly an hour ago, and wondered for the umpteenth time what was going on. She'd been told right after graduation that she needed to go see a one Samuel Carter with the Interplanetary Combatives Training program... more informally known as the N school, for the vocational code that went with the certification it granted.

She'd known vaguely that they'd played a role in getting her into basic, but wasn't too sure what, if anything, they'd wanted. She'd been fairly sure that her biotic talent would have garnered more attention, but she'd be shuffled along the normal training route with next to no mention of it whatsoever.

Before she could run her thoughts around the same course they'd be trundling along on for last hour another time, the door latched clicked and opened.

"Shepard?" a voice called from inside.

She stood up quickly, leaning her head around the doorframe. "Sir?"

The man at the desk – Sam Carter, she assumed – was an older, dark-skinned man with a severe countenance and hard eyes. He looked her up and down as she stepped into the doorframe, then gave a small nod at one of the chairs. "Shut the door and take a seat, private," he said gruffly.

Shepard closed the door and sat down on one of the hard chairs across from the man. As she settled in, he began speaking. "I am General Samuel Carter, in charge of recruitment for the Interplanetary Combatives Training program," he said.

"A pleasure, sir," she said.

"Drop the act, private," he snapped at her.

_Shit._ "Sir?" she asked, a slight scowl on her face.

"I said drop the act, Shepard, I know it's fake, and I don't have the patience to deal with it."

_Definitely shit._

"Sir," she replied, the politely intrigued and nervous expression fading from her face as if it had never been. She stared at the general with steady and calculating eyes.

"Better," he said. "I know who you are, I know _what_ you are, and I know what you did."

She shrugged. "So Doctor Wells didn't keep his promise."

The general snorted. "He tried, girl, but I outrank him. He didn't have a choice. I'm not here to kick you out or lock you up, though," he said, raising his hands in placating gesture.

_Oh? This should be interesting,_ she thought to herself as she raised an eyebrow at the general. "You're not?"

"No." He pushed his chair back from the desk and stood, turning away from her to look out a window onto the training grounds where the graduation ceremony was still being cleaned up. "We don't normally send potential biotics through basic training, you know," he offered.

"I wondered about that," she said. "The recruitment posters seemed to make a big deal out of it."

"Strong biotics with an interest in military service are rare, Shepard," he said without facing her. "But your case is... unique."

"Because of what I am," she said calmly.

"Exactly. Brain scans can only tell us so much. We needed to see how you would react in a real scenario."

"As if boot camp is a 'real scenario," she scoffed.

He shrugged. "It's real enough."

She tucked her hands behind her head and slouched in the chair. "So you were testing me. Did I pass?"

He turned to face her and gave a short laugh. "You already know the answer to that," he said, sitting back in his chair.

She smiled coldly at him. "Fair enough. I don't know the details, however," she said, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, "so why don't you explain what's going on?"

"Fine," he said. "Here's the deal: You get an L3 amplifier implant, join the ICT, graduate from N-school, and serve honorably in the military for at least three complete tours of duty. In return, that mess with the Reds vanishes, and your medical records are locked up as tight as we can make them. After your three tours are up, you're free to do whatever you want."

"And if I decline?"

"Then you're arrested for twenty six counts of first degree homicide, four counts of smuggling illicit substances, three counts of burglary, all with gang enhancements. You spend the rest of your life in prison or a locked ward."

"Hm," she said noncommittally. "Am I limited to three tours?"

"No."

_Perfect._

"Then I accept," she said simply, and reached across the desk to shake the general's hand. "Where do I start?" the newest N-school recruit asked, face breaking into a feral grin.

* * *

_A/N: Not sure how much of Shepard's N-ville training I want to cover. I'll probably do a small bit with her biotics, but unless there's a huge demand for it I'd rather move on to the more interesting bits... you know, the parts with all the other people that we know and love._

_Oh, and Torfan. Because really, did you expect her to have any other background?_


	5. Chapter 5

_A/N: We're obviously skipping ahead a few years. Shepard graduated from the ICT with flying colors as a Vanguard... because when you don't have any fear, scary situations simply become another weapon in your arsenal. If bloody close quarters battle isn't terrifying, what is?_

_This is probably the last "non-game" chapter for a while. Pretty much everything else from here on will be in context of the game, or very closely tied to it. Also, uh... this is going to be sort of brutal. Probably gratuitously so. I'm sorry in advance, as 'subtle' really isn't what I'm good at. Hopefully I'll get better._

* * *

Shepard stepped into the small conference room, surprised to find that it was already mostly filled. She'd always preferred to be early to meetings, both in the Reds and in her life in the military. It let her scope out the area, check exits, and keep an eye on the people that arrived after her. As an added benefit, many people saw it as professional to be slightly early – that it matched her natural proclivities was an extra advantage to her.

She scanned the room quickly, noting the sound-dampening environment, the faraday cage warning on the wall, and the discrete – but unavoidable – scanner positioned in the entry hall. Whatever got discussed in this room _stayed_ in this room, and she wondered what sort of briefing this was supposed to be.

Whatever it was, it was likely to be interesting.

She took a seat near the door, off to the side. She never liked being in line of sight of a door. If someone stormed the room she was in, she liked not being the first target picked... but at the same time, she didn't like being trapped in the back of a room that people were suddenly trying to escape from. Her preference, if one was available, was a seat near the exit but not directly next to it.

She headed for one of the typical, mass-produced plastic desks near the left wall of the room while giving the occupants of the room a discrete study. They were men and women, all from different branches of service and of varying ranks. She was surprised to see a full general present at a briefing with a pair of lowly second lieutenants. As a freshly-promoted lieutenant commander, she fell roughly in the middle of the crowd.

This was _definitely_ going to be an interesting briefing.

A quiet but piercing alarm behind her snapped her head around, and she looked over to see a full admiral rolling his eyes and taking an omni-tool projector out of his pocket before stuffing it in a tray by the door. Noticing her glance, he smiled at her. "Wear one so often, you forget about it sometimes," he said jokingly.

"As you say, sir," she replied politely as he walked toward the podium at the front of the room. What little conversation there had been among the members of the audience quieted respectfully as he stepped up and cleared his throat.

"Alright, ladies and gentlemen, the sooner we get rolling, the sooner we can be done," he announced to the room while the lights dimmed.

He cleared his throat, giving the room a quick once-over before speaking."I see we've got some new faces here," he said with a brief nod at Shepard and a few of the others. "We don't generally like to take fresh blood without a longer vetting period, but the sheer scale of this operation means we don't have much of a choice," he grimaced, and several members of the audience nodded sympathetically.

"With that in mind, let's get the usual warnings out of the way: This meeting _never happened _and speaking about anything you hear to _anybody_ not in this room right now is grounds for all kinds of unpleasantries that we'd really rather avoid. If you're concerned over the legitimacy of this operation, I can get you written orders after the brief."

_Well. It looks like "interesting" doesn't even begin to cover it._

"As you may be aware," he said in a dry tone, "A couple years ago, hegemony-backed batarian raiders attacked our colony at Elysium. SOP in cases like this is to locate the group that launched the attack and take them out to discourage this sort of activity. So far, it's worked well enough, but we've never had to deal with an attack this brazen or this _large_ before. Luckily for us, the size of the raid means it's nearly impossible for them to go to ground, and we've tracked down where they launched from."

"Our target is a large subterranean batarian base on the moon of Torfan," he said, thumbing a projector to life and turning the lights in the room all the way off. "It's nominally an independent slaving operation, but a _lot_ of Hegemony defensive emplacements and ships have 'found' their way into the slavers' hands."

The holographic moon expanded, zooming in on a large hive-like structure nestled into the side of a small hill on the northern half of the planetoid. The admiral, whose name Shepard _still_ didn't know, pointed at the entrance.

"The goal of this operation is to send the batarians a message," he said. "If we just wanted it gone, we'd just pound the entrance from orbit and set up a picket to watch for anyone digging out. You're going to be going in _on foot_ to clear the base_, _nominally in case there are any slaves inside that might be killed by an orbital bombardment. The _true_ reason is because pretending we think there are slaves there makes the next part easier to pull off."

"Sir, with all due respect, that's a deathtrap," one of the lieutenants interrupted. "Assaulting a fortified valley on foot, and then pushing in to a military bunker?" he shook his head skeptically, and several of the other soldiers in the room nodded agreement.

He leaned forward on the podium and met the wary gazes of the assembled soldiers one by one. "I understand your trepidation, but it's necessary," he said shortly.

"You see, we are going in to that base to _clear _it. _Every_ batarian in that complex is a target. Slavers, soldiers... e_veryone_ dies. You will_ not_ be accepting the surrender of any batarians in that bunker," he reiterated for clarity. "We don't think there are any noncombatants there, but it's a possibility. If you come across any – spouses, children, merchants, slaves, whatever – use your best judgment." He stared around the room for a moment, letting the words sink in. "Remember: We're here to send a message. Anyone not in a cage here is associated directly with slaving, or at best is one step removed from it. The Systems Alliance does not tolerate slavers, and it does _not _tolerate attacks on its colonies_._ Got it?"

The room was silent.

Nodding slowly, he sighed and leaned back from the podium. "Good. The ground team is going in with helmet cams on. A copy of the footage will be released through by PsyOps through some back door channels to the batarian media. Under _no circumstances _are you to make a private copy of the footage, and _all_ helmet cams are to be turned in to your QM for wiping before you step off the transports. It is _absolutely essential_ that nobody knows this was sanctioned."

"Officially, the Alliance will deny it as a work of batarian computer image manipulation, and claim that the actual operation was a simple military sweep of a pirate raiding base where the occupants refused to surrender. Since they've disavowed any involvement," he said with a humorless grin, "they can't go after us too enthusiastically or risk accusations from the Alliance that they're supporting slave raids on our colonies."

He pushed another button, and the moon vanished to be replaced with a force layout. "That's the broad overview. Now, for the details. Commander Shepard, you'll be serving with Major Kyle and the eighth company for the ground team..."

An unfamiliar feeling swept through Commander Shepard. Slowly, at first, but persistent, and her eyes narrowed dangerously as she realized what it was: _Anticipation._

She had spent the last eight years training, fighting, and fulfilling obligations to the Alliance military, but never before had she been given a task where she could truly let loose. She'd been forced to hide behind the mask of Commander L. Shepard, tough and responsible soldier, while Elle Shepard, ruthless and calculating biotic psychopath, sat bored.

Now, though... _she_ was being given a task. Oh, it was nominally being handed to Commander Shepard, but she knew that the real reason she was here was because of what she'd originally been recruited for, not what she'd been required to pretend to be.

There would be consequences. People would call her names, she was sure. They'd probably throw an award or something at her for it. She didn't care. She was being let loose, _finally_ let loose, on a complicated and difficult problem worthy of her full attention. The people didn't matter, except insofar as they provided another layer of complexity to the task set before her. Her mind whirled through countless details, listing potential problems to correct, cataloging the dangerous situations she would need to handle... yes, it was going to be interesting operation _indeed_.

She smiled to herself and focused on the details the admiral was giving her and the major, inwardly rubbing her hands together in glee as the briefing continued.

* * *

Shepard winced as she touched her face, glancing down at the blood slick on her fingers. That rocket had gotten _far_ too close for comfort, and judging by the throbbing pulse she felt across her face every her heart beat she suspected she'd need more than just medi-gel soon.

That was soon, though. _Now_ there was a group of armored batarians trying to crawl up her flank past one of the destroyed turrets. _Trying to flush us from cover,_ she thought to herself. _Not today._

Even after years of practice, she never quite got fully used to what her amplifier did to her abilities. When she was young, she'd learned to coordinate the random muscle spasms she'd used to deliver energy to the element zero nodules scattered throughout her body in a controlled enough manner to do more than glow faintly. With the amplifier, the same muscle memory caused a massive tingling sensation as the amplifier sent a pulse down her nervous system, changing what would have been a relatively small effect into a force that could tear tanks apart.

She didn't like the tingling it left behind afterward, or the coppery taste on her tongue... but those were minor effects, at least compared to what some of the earlier amplifiers did. The L2 implant that she'd narrowly avoided getting could leave you in crippling pain... or worse. A mouth full of pennies and an irritating tingle were minor inconveniences to work with when one could literally throw cars at people. The Hammond electrogravitational equivalency equation – the 22nd century version of E=mc^2 – spelled out exactly what she could do.

The batarian squad trying to flank her tenuous position was flung against the ruins of the turret they had been trying to sneak by. One of them, a tall one in nicer looking armor, died instantly – a piece of torn armor on the gun nearly sliced him in half as he flew past the edge of the emplacement. The other two were less fortunate: When Shepard saw that the impact hadn't immediately killed them, she had followed up the straightforward push with a far more insidious power.

The Warp class of techniques – there was a fancy asari name for them that she'd learned in ICT, but it escaped her at the moment – were designed to take down shields quickly and weaken structures. When used on unshielded flesh, the effects were... dramatic was the polite way to put it. The two surviving soldiers found themselves the center of a rapidly shifting set of intense gravitational fields a few centimeters apart. They were literally torn to pieces as their bones cracked, connective tissues snapped, and blood seeped through their pores in random directions. One died mercifully quickly, his brain pulped into goo against the inside of his own skull.

The other one, whose head hadn't quite been in range of the full effect, had a more gruesome end: He died of asphyxiation, gurgling as his lungs and heart were twisted a full hundred and eighty degrees around inside his chest cavity.

Shepard huffed and spat on the ground. She really didn't like the taste of pennies.

* * *

Not many of them had survived to reach the entrance to the bunker.

She and Major Kyle had started the assault with a full company consisting of two hundred and fifty soldiers split into five platoons of fifty soldiers. Of that entire force, she had only sixty three able-bodied men and women with her, and some of them – herself included – were walking wounded. Fortunately for the people she'd had to leave behind, the moon had an atmosphere. It wasn't breathable, consisting mostly of heavy noble gasses, but it was dense enough to prevent suit ruptures from being immediately lethal.

They all reacted differently to what had happened, Shepard noticed. Some were grim-faced and serious, putting any consideration of what had happened out of their minds until after the battle was done. She liked those people. She could rely on them, count on them to do their duties, to react predictably. Fortunately for her, most of the soldiers she had left fell into this category.

Others had shut down, going into a kind of shock. They starred off into space, or worse, back along the corpse-strewn approach that had led to the bunker door. Some of them wouldn't stop crying. They were harder to deal with, but could handle simple tasks. Others still had broken down completely. Major Kyle hadn't taken the death of his last platoon member well, and when he'd seen the trail of bodies behind them, some still moaning into the dense air... he'd just collapsed. No amount of cajoling or threats had gotten him moving again, so Shepard had taken command of the ground team.

Some seemed sharpened by what had happened, almost wild. That worried Shepard. Not for the mission; because she knew what the purpose of this attack was, even if they didn't. No, they worried her because she didn't know how much of their mind was left. Crazed, grief-stricken people with guns was never a recipe for a smooth operation.

Near the entry to the bunker, a dying batarian groaned. She stood wearily, walking over and shooting him once in the head before turning back to the survivors of their assault. "So," she asked, her voice hoarse, "anyone still have their shaped charges?"

An ebony-skinned woman nodded tiredly and dragged herself to her feet. "Yes, ma'am," she said as she limped forward. "But if we blow this door, anyone without a mask is gonna choke," she said with a frown.

Shepard shook her head. "If they had any slaves left in there, they'd already be trying to use them as bargaining chips," she said. "Plant the charges."

The demolitions expert nodded slowly. "Aye aye, ma'am. Hell of a thing, losing all those people for nothing," she said, jerking her head toward the road up with a bitter laugh.

"Hey," Shepard said, gripping the woman's shoulder. "Not for nothing," she said with a reassuring nod.

The woman gave a weak smile. "I guess we woulda felt pretty bad if we'd blown it from orbit and they'd had people from Elysium there, huh," she said.

_Well, if our own troops think it's a rescue mission, the batarians probably will, _Shepard thought with a mental note to leave her out front on guard duty when the _real_ part of the job took place.

She surveyed her remaining forces again, her mind flitting through numerous scenarios. Taking the bunker was likely to cost almost all of them their lives, but the window for assaulting this base wasn't a big one – too long, and the moon's quick rotation would require that she fall back to the transports or take refuge in the bunker during the "day" to prevent baking.

_Option one: We call it here and pull back. We don't get the PR win of taking the base, and the mission's scrubbed. The batarians reinforce the area, and the Alliance's entire colony defensive policy weakens. _She winced. She'd prefer to avoid an open war with the batarians, as large wars weren't conducive to long life.

_Option two: We shell the place. We don't get the PR win, but the policy stays intact. The batarians accuse us of shelling civilians, and they have evidence to "prove" it. _That was almost as bad as the first option, effectively giving the batarians the same victory that the Alliance was trying to pull off.

_Option three: We push on. We likely lose the rest of the ground team, but given how thin their defense seems to be... they may be as badly wounded here as we are._ That was probably the best option, then. She took a deep breath and lifted her helmet, quickly scarfing an energy bar from a belt pouch as the woman with the charges walked up to her.

"All set, ma'am," the demolitions expert – Casey, J. her shirt read – said as she twisted a pair of keys on a remote detonator and handed it to Shepard. "These new shaped charges are pretty good, but I'd still recommend being a ways back before we blow this door."

"Thanks," she said before turning back to the resting remains of the company. "Okay, people, on your feet – get at least twenty meters back and behind cover. When that door goes down, I want two groups pushing in. Doyle, Nunez, Zimmerman – you three take the right side behind that roadblock, and I want Klein, Padilla, and Gibbs on the left side. Jefferson and Wong, you two are with me. The rest of you, stay here and secure the entrance. With any luck we'll get backup."

The men and women of the eighth platoon jumped into motion despite their wounds and exhaustion, and Shepard nodded approvingly at their dedication. "Ready," she shouted, "blowing the door in five... four... three... two... one..."

She stuffed a finger in her ear, shoved her other ear into her shoulder, and twisted the knob on the small box. A heavy _crumph_ echoed through the thick air, followed almost immediately by the almost electronic whine of element zero powered assault rifles as the two groups stormed into the breach.

Klein's group died almost instantly, cut apart by a mounted turret that the batarians had set up inside the entryway. Shepard threw a barrier up that blunted the worst of the attack on her squad before the turret swept over the right side of the room, chewing divots in the supply crates that Doyle had taken cover behind but leaving the squad cowering behind it unharmed. Knowing that her barrier – strong as it was – wouldn't soak another sweep of the gun, she dove to the ground, flinging her second to last grenade forward as she did.

She was rewarded with another loud explosion that left her ears ringing slightly and an agonized scream as the incendiary payload she'd equipped her modular grenades with ate through batarian equipment and flesh with equal rapidity. A relatively quiet secondary explosion told her that at least _something_ in the gun was broken, and she clambered quickly to her feet.

The room was a mess, she noticed as she surveyed it quickly. The ruined bodies of Klein's group near the entrance, the burning and broken gun, the screaming batarian trying to put the phosphorous incendiary out by rolling around on the ground, Doyle's group firing blindly down the hall at nothing in particular...

She sighed and gave a vehement 'weapons down' handsign to Doyle's group, who sheepishly let go of the triggers. A quick round from her shotgun shut the screaming batarian up, and the ringing in her ears was even more pronounced in the sudden silence.

"Right," she said, glancing around the room. "Nunez, you have medical training, right?"

One of the soldiers from Doyle's group nodded, eyes not leaving the hallway leading deeper into the complex. "Yes, ma'am," he replied.

"Good. See if anyone in Doyle's group is alive. I'm going to move in on the base," she said and stepped out of the smoke filled room to bring another group forward.

"Aye aye, ma'am," the medic said, stowing his rifle and limping over to check on the thoroughly mangled bodies near the entrance.

Shepard ignored him. She had other things to worry about.

* * *

It had taken the better part of an hour and the lives of forty eight of the remaining ground team, but she'd managed to push almost all the way through the labyrinthine bunker.

She'd sworn when her last technical expert had tripped one of the countless booby traps the batarians had left behind as they retreated deeper into the complex. There wasn't much you could do for someone when they were on the receiving end of an antivehicle shaped charge.

Low on explosives and with no hacker, they'd been restricted to areas that weren't locked down, which weren't many, or areas that they'd been able to blow or pry their way into. With the moon's dawn rapidly approaching, Shepard was about to call the mission when she heard something clatter from the hall where they'd just been.

"Hold it," she said, holding up a fist to stop her squad. "Any of you hear that?"

"Yeah," a burly private said behind her. "And we just cleared that passage," he added.

"That was passage to their quarters, wasn't it?" her other teammate asked.

"Yeah, it was," Shepard said with a grim smile. "Let's go see who got locked out."

* * *

Shepard knelt down gently, hands in plain view and palms up, attempting to look as nonthreatening as possible to the young batarian boy they'd found hiding in one of the crates.

"Hey there," she said to the boy gently. "We're not going to hurt you."

The terrified kid scuttled deeper into the crate.

"Easy," she said soothingly. "easy. Can you understand me?" She spoke slowly, in a low and calm tone of voice.

The boy nodded jerkily, tears in his eyes.

"Good," she said in the same voice. "I know you're afraid of us, but we won't hurt you if you do what we ask. Do you understand?"

The boy nodded again, still trembling.

"Alright," she said, and began to stand, offering the kid a hand out of the crate. "we need you to let us in to the living quarters. Can you do that?" she asked.

He froze for a moment, then shook his head.

"I'm not going to hurt you," she promised him. "And I think the people there want to surrender."

He gazed at her, wary but hopeful.

"Really," she said again. "If I were them, I certainly would," she smiled kindly at the boy.

"Okay," he said, his voice sounding weak in her translator, "I'll take you."

* * *

True to his word, the boy led her and her squad back to the armored door to the living quarters. He glanced once more at Shepard, then punched in a code on the door's red panel, which flickered to green.

Shepard motioned her two accompanying soldiers to stand aside and raised her barrier in case the batarians had a trap planned. Taking the kid gently by the shoulder, she held him in front of her as she slapped the door panel."

The room inside was nearly packed. There were wounded soldiers, what looked like a few merchants, some of what Shepard assumed were female batarians – Shepard wasn't entirely sure with their bulky armor on – and several kids.

The room froze as they saw her.

One of the older-looking batarians in the front stepped toward her, stance formal. "We surrende-" he began.

Shepard's rising fist interrupted him, the searing blue glow of the strongest lift field she could generate flinging everyone into the air as well as casting the room into a sudden harsh blue relief.

She unslung her shotgun and proceeded to casually blow the batarian's skull into shreds.

"This isn't vengeance," she said calmly to the shocked and floating room, her shotgun punching a hole through another suspended batarian. "It isn't revenge."

"This isn't about the dead soldiers upstairs, or the families you tore apart on Elysium," she continued as she walked along the suspended slavers. "It isn't even really about slavery." Her shotgun clicked, its heat indicator beeping, and she stowed it for her pistol.

"This is about consequences," she said, loading a block of explosive ammunition into the butt of the pistol. "You can attack our colonies, capture our people, hurt us," she acknowledged. "But there will be consequences. There are _always_ consequences."

She took careful aim at the boy she'd found in the crates earlier, aiming between his upper eyes and squeezing the trigger as he trembled. His head erupted into mist that floated in the air, condensing slowly into droplets. Somewhere in the room, he heard a strangled cry, and she redoubled her focus on the the lift field to keep her captives still.

"If you attack the Alliance, we will come for you. We will hunt you down. No matter where you run, where you hide, whose arms you seek solace in, _we will find you,_" she promised, her voice as empty as the holes she'd been leaving in the slavers.

She walked along a line of batarians clustered in the corner, taking them out with carefully placed single shots. "This is not a threat. It is a _guarantee_."

"You have my word on it," she said, and tossed her last incendiary grenade into the center of the room.

* * *

After the screams finally died down, Shepard looked up to see the two privates she'd had with her standing slack-jawed in the doorway. "Holy... _fuck_..." one of them swore slowly, eyes sweeping the carnage-covered room.

"You killed them," the other stammered out. "You killed... _all_ of them... the kid..."

Shepard gave a tired grin at the shocked man. "I kept my promise: I didn't hurt him," she said wearily while chewing on an energy bar.

"You _killed_ him! That's him, right there!" the soldier pointed at the small corpse missing half its head.

"I didn't hurt him," Shepard reiterated. "Hypersonic explosive round between the upper pair of eyes, which is where batarian upper brain functions reside. He was functionally brain-dead before he had time to feel the shot."

"Jesus," one of them whispered, turning a little green around the lips.

Shepard sighed. "If you're going to throw up, do it in the hall, please," she said as the private made a run for the door. She tucked the wrapper on her energy bar into one of her belt pouches and gave a final look around the room. "Let's get out of here."

She walked for the door without a backward glance, slowing only to grab the collars of the armor of the two marines as she stepped into the hall, dragging them topside, away from the little slice of hell she'd just created.

* * *

"_In other news," _the asari newscaster said, _"batarian intelligence claims to have evidence of war crimes committed by the systems alliance in clearing the slaver den on Torfan. Alliance high command has dismissed the claims, calling the purported evidence 'an obvious forgery' and refusing to give credence to the issue by discussing it further. Futures in batarian labor firms dropped heavily on the news-"_

Shepard smiled to herself and clicked the news display off.

* * *

_A/N: Well._

_My apologies for the huge drop in quality for this chapter – I wrote most of it with a hundred and one degree fever. I might edit it later._

_We'll see the other sides of Shepard as time goes on - she's not all murder, all the time, even if that's what happened here._


	6. Chapter 6

_A/N: Still sick. Writing to distract myself. I think this chapter came out better than the last one, but then again, that's not exactly much of an accomplishment -.-;_

_Also, I reread the last chapter – **wow** that was terrible. I'll definitely rewrite that later. Eugh._

* * *

_Five years later..._

The raid on Torfan, as gruesome as it had been, was largely successful: The batarians had retreated from citadel space, leaving the Systems Alliance colonies unmolested. Independent slavers were still a problem, but the well-funded and organized groups discretely backed by the Hegemony were gone.

She had earned a new moniker as well, although few would dare use it to her face. The Butcher of Torfan, she was called, generally by angry and bitter relatives of the soldiers she'd gotten killed. Either nobody cared or nobody knew what she'd done to the batarians in the tunnels deep beneath the moon's surface. She suspected the latter.

Her career from that point had been quite similar to what it was before. She served on various frigates, generally in charge of the marine detachment, and conducted various peacekeeping and S&R operations. They're weren't difficult, but it was certainly nice to have a reputation for being polite and considerate instead of a child-slaughtering monstrosity. She didn't, as a general rule, care what people thought of her – but their opinions shaped what she could and could not convince them to do. People were more likely to help someone who had helped them, or were friendly, than someone who shoved guns in their faces.

Common courtesy, and all that.

In the interest of not getting hunted down by any more vengeful relatives than were already after her for getting their sons or cousins or fathers killed, she'd made it a point to take the high road when the option presented itself. With her abilities, there were few situations that put her in any real danger, so taking a "risk" to make people happy cost her little and benefited her greatly.

By the end of her second tour of duty, she had to have the single most contradictory reputation of any soldier in the entire Systems Alliance military. She was the Butcher of Torfan, who callously got an entire platoon killed just to complete a mission and – if she wasn't in earshot, and the rumors were to be believed – gunned down a room full of surrendering batarians. On the other hand, she was also outspoken in the need to for the races of the galaxy to address their issues peacefully, and had distinguished herself several times in various search and rescue operations on colonies that had been attacked or suffered natural disasters. People who met her had found her to be patient, polite, and kind.

It was with a small amount of trepidation, then, that she'd answered the summons to a private, _highly classified_ briefing. She hoped that whatever was going on _this_ time wouldn't require her to undo all the work she'd put into making a respectable image of herself. That would be frustrating.

Still, there was no sense in wasting time. She locked the personal terminal in her quarters and headed out into the halls of Arcturus Station.

* * *

The briefing room was much like the one from half a decade ago: Well-shielded, scan proof, and muffled. The room arrangement, however, was different. Instead of a podium, there was a table and a chair, and she noted with surprise that several high-level members of the Systems Alliance military as well as the diplomatic corps were sitting in the audience holding slates.

"Ah, Commander, there you are," a gravelly voice said. "Please, take a seat," he gestured to the stage. Somewhat confused, Shepard headed up to the desk, sitting down in the well-padded chair provided. She noted with no small amount of frustration that the lights they had on made it nearly impossible to see the people in the audience. _Probably intentional_, she thought to herself. There really were better ways to let someone observe an interview, she grumbled.

"I am Admiral Steven Hackett," the voice repeated, and gestured around to the faces in the room. "I believe you've already met Captain David Anderson." he nodded at the man sitting next to him. "Antony Blackwell is from the Diplomatic corps, Doctor Alicia Glenn is a psychologist, and... John Smith... is a respected member of Alliance Intelligence," he snorted quietly at the pseudonym.

"Before you ask, this is not a briefing for a specific mission," he said as preamble. "however, everything here _is_ classified, and we'd appreciate if you answer all the questions as truthfully as you can."

She nodded, slightly offended that they thought she would lie to their faces. "Yes, sir," she replied.

"Good," he said. "Glenn? I think you wanted to kick this off?"

The vaguely feminine silhouette nodded. "I did, sir. Commander Shepard, you were born on Earth, correct?"

"Yes, ma'am, I was," Shepard said, wondering why they were bothering to ask things they obviously already knew.

"Do you know who your parents are?" she asked.

_Why do they care, _she wondered, before shaking her head. "No, ma'am. I was raised by a street gang in Vancouver."

The doctor scribbled something on her slate, then looked back up at her. "Yes, the Reds," she said. "Apparently, they were attacked shortly before you left to join the military. Do you know what happened to them?"

_Oh, shit._ "Yes," she said, without elaborating.

"What happened?"

Shepard thought quickly. "They were killed in a fight," she said.

Hackett leaned forward. "Shepard, we're not interested in playing twenty questions here," he said with a hint of amusement. "You're not getting kicked out for this, and the agreement you have with us stands," he said.

_He probably organized it, _she thought. "Very well, sir. I killed them, ma'am."

"You did," she said, sounding wholly unsurprised. "Can you tell me why?"

She blinked. They didn't know? "They wanted to get involved in drug smuggling. I told them that was a terrible idea, and said that I was going to leave if they persisted. They persisted, so I left. It's not... _easy_... to leave a gang," she said hesitantly.

"Why did you object to drug smuggling?" the woman asked.

"Because it was a bad idea, that's why," Shepard said immediately, counting reasons off on her fingers. "First, we had no idea what was a good price was. Most of the Reds couldn't afford a drug habit. Second, we were new, so not only would nobody trust us, we'd get a terrible deal because of it. Third, because we didn't know who was trustworthy or not, we risked getting used and discarded. Fourth, while the authorities knew us, they didn't go after us as much as they did the other gangs, because we kept all our fights between gangs and didn't involve your average Joe trying to live his life," she said.

"I thought that we were in no position to enter in to that kind of business without a hell of a lot more preparation, and that it would all backfire." She shrugged. "Our old leader disagreed, so I told him I was leaving. They threatened to turn me in for some of the things I'd done, but not before... punishing... me for my disloyalty," she said. "I wasn't interested in enduring that, so I killed them."

"Understandable," the woman said with a nod of sympathy. "just to clarify, however, those were the only reasons you objected to entering into the smuggling business?"

Shepard thought back to the arguments she'd had a decade ago with Malcolm, their old leader. They'd disagreed on pricing, handoff agreements, pricing, how to sell... "No, ma'am, that's pretty much it," she said. "it wasn't in our best interest, for a lot of reasons."

Alicia nodded, apparently satisfied. "Thank you, Commander."

Captain Anderson spoke next. "Commander," he began, and Shepard smiled, recognizing his voice. "you pushed forward on Torfan, despite knowing it would likely get most of your unit killed, and then proceeded to slaughter the remaining batarians and their families. Why?"

Shepard gave a long sigh, organizing her thoughts. "Because, sir, it was the best option available."

He folded his arms and gave a small snort. "You'll have to explain that one, I'm afraid," he said dryly.

"Sir, you have to know that the Alliance can't defend every colony and station we have," she said, and he nodded. "So we don't. We just blow up the people that attack us, as quickly as possible. I know the technique, it's the same one you use in gangs to ensure nobody messes with you." The military members at the table winced hearing the Alliance defensive doctrine compared to gang tactics, but she pressed on.

"Tofan was retribution for the Skyllian Blitz, plain and simple. The thing about that kind of tactic is it only works if the enemy _knows_ that they're going to get hurt for what they've done to you. If there's even a chance they might not, they'll ignore the likely retribution and attack anyway."

"Because of the scenario that the brass set up on Torfan, we needed to finish the hit in one go, or we'd end up handing the public relations victory to the batarians. Remember, they weren't 'officially' a batarian group, so if we'd failed – even once – in taking them out, the Hegemony could laugh at us for being unable to take out a band of independent slavers. Our retribution policy would lose its teeth, and we'd see a huge increase in attacks on our colonies."

"In order for the Alliance to justify complete slaughter of an entire base, we had to go in on foot, pretending that there were slaves there that might be rescued. If we'd shelled the entrance from orbit, we'd have been accused of willingly killing civilians by the batarians, and there'd be _believable _evidence, too."

She sighed. "A colony raid generally causes several thousands of casualties, both civilian and military, and that's not counting the raiders that get killed. The infrastructure costs are huge, the loss of confidence weakens the economy... it's a devastating ripple effect. Losing a platoon and a killing few slavers and their families was the course of action that killed the _fewest_ people in the long term," she finished, meeting the gaze of Captain Anderson, who was shaking his head slowly. "Is there something wrong with my evaluation, Captain?" she asked sharply.

"No, Commander," he said after a moment. "I agree with your... logic." He leaned over and whispered something to the doctor, who nodded. "That's all from me. John?"

John – a well-dressed, blank-faced man of indeterminate age – cleared his throat and spoke.

"Commander, allow me to pose a hypothetical situation to you," he said. "Let's pretend that a terrorist has hijacked a space station in low orbit around a populated world, taken the occupants hostage, and is planning to drop the station on the planet. You have time to save the station residents while letting the terrorist escape, or you can kill the terrorist while letting hostages die before you need to go stop the station from hitting the planet. Which do you do?"

She thought for a moment, then shook her head. "I kill the terrorist," she said firmly.

He nodded at her, marking down a note on his slate. "Why?"

"Saving the most people," she said. "Taking a station isn't easy, and people already died for him to be in the position he's in. If I let him go, he's welcome to do it again, and I can't guarantee I can stop him twice. Even if I do, he's still killed people on the station, and if I let him go, even if I stop him every time, he's going to kill a lot of people setting up these sort of events. By stopping him here, even if the hostages die, I ensure he'll never do it again."

"So you let the hostages die, in order to potentially save more people later on?" he asked, eyebrows raised.

"Yes."

"It doesn't bother you to condemn the hostages to death?"

She shook her head. "No, sir, it doesn't. You've seen my file, I assume?" He nodded. "Then you know why."

It continued like that for nearly two hours. Questions about her past, her actions, her love interests – as if she'd had any – her _hobbies,_ her family, her plans for the future... it was nerve-wracking to sit through. She was exhausted when Hackett had finally stood, thanked her for her time, and told her she was free to go.

She'd entered the room confused, and left it _completely_ bewildered.

* * *

_Two days later..._

Donnel Udina rubbed his eyes tiredly. "Well, what about Shepard?" he asked, pulling the file from her interview up. "Earthborn," he noted after a quick read, "but... no record of her family..."

"Doesn't have one," David Anderson summarized quickly. "Grew up on the streets. Learned to look out for herself."

"She got her whole unit killed on Torfan," Hackett said gravely, gesturing at the military record in the file.

Anderson shook his head. "She gets the job done, no matter the cost," he said bitterly.

Udina's eyebrows went up, and he glanced at the captain and the admiral. "Is that the kind of person we _want_ protecting the galaxy?"

Anderson sighed. "That's the only kind of person who _can_ protect the galaxy," he said sadly.

Udina sat for a moment, staring the file without reading it, his mind a thousand kilometers away. Finally, he nodded. "I'll make the call," he said, and reached for his communicator.

Hackett and Anderson nodded in turn at him and stood, taking their leave as he punched in a number.

* * *

Out in the hallway, Anderson glanced at Hackett. "You think this is a good idea?"

He shook his head slowly. "Probably not, but not for the reasons you think," he said as they began walking toward the front of the building.

"Oh? Why's that?" Anderson asked, holding the door for the admiral, who gave a brief thanks.

"The exact same reason that she's the best choice out of all the candidates we have," Hackett said as they walked for a waiting cab. "Because she's not a hero. She isn't in this for the glory, or the duty, or anything else. She'll follow orders, in letter and spirit, but she's just not invested in military service outside of the bargain we made with her back when she joined."

The automated cab beeped as Anderson punched the address of the spaceport in. "And that runs out... in four years?" Anderson asked, and Hackett nodded.

"The end of her next tour, yeah. Thing is, you don't exactly quit being a SPECTRE. I don't know about you, but I don't want her chasing me down for weaseling out of our bargain."

Anderson imagined her cold jade eyes staring him down as the last thing he'd see and shuddered. "Me neither," he said vehemently. "So what do we do about it? Go tell Udina we've had second thoughts?"

Hackett shook his head. "No. Like it or not, she _is_ the best soldier for the job."

Anderson snorted. "So, what, we just admit that we signed our own death sentences? I'd like to have kids someday, Steve," he said, his tone joking, but his eyes were serious.

"I know, David, I know. Way I see it, we've got just over four years to find a reason for her to stick around."

Anderson groaned and stuck buried his face in forearms on the dash of the cab. "Great. Four years to figure out how to get an _emotionless psychopath_ to put her life on the line every day for the rest of her life, instead of retiring comfortably and learning how to play another instrument, or whatever she does for fun."

"She's not completely emotionless, but yeah, pretty much," Hackett said.

"Great." Anderson groaned.

"You know what the best part is," Hackett said after a minute or two.

"Hmm?" Anderson tilted his head enough to cast a single skeptical eye at the admiral.

"You're going to have to be her CO to pull it off," he said with a rare grin.

"...with all due respect, sir, I hate you," he said, stuffing his head back into his arms as the cab sped toward the spaceport.

* * *

_A/N: Going to use this space to respond to the guest reviews I've gotten, since I can't send messages to guests._

_First, regarding biotics... they absolutely **can** punch through tanks. I distinctly remember warping geth to death in all three games, and a high-rank throw imparts roughly as much force as a mid-sized sedan running into a wall at thirty miles per hour. Outside some specific situations which will come up in ME2, I treat Shepard as being a "new game plus" character who starts out with a relatively filled ability tree._

_For those that wanted more detail about the biotics, those will come up in bits and pieces. The biggest parts will come up in the ME2 and ME3 sections of this fic, because that's where they'll have the most impact. For now, her oddly-placed element zero nodules are part of my reason why she's a psychopath and helps explain why she's such a potent biotic – which Kaidan actually comments on in ME1, if you spend enough time talking to him._

_That's actually a big part of why I started writing this fic: I wanted to give reasons for all the little "videogame-isms" that the series had. "Why is Shepard, mechanically, so much more powerful than her biotic squadmates with more powerful equipment? Oh, it's because of X. Why is Shepard placed in a position of trust, despite being a horrible murderer? Because of X." I like providing the X. It's fun to me._

_To those that wonder why she'd end up in a relationship with Liara... that's a seeeecreet. For a while, anyway. I promise that when it happens, it'll make sense... or, well, that I think it'll make sense, at least. It certainly won't a typical love story, I can tell you that much!_

_Lastly, a lot of this writing comes from notes I've prepared over several months. As I start having to make more material from whole cloth, it'll slow down somewhat... although I still write fairly quickly. Badly, but quickly. Hopefully quality will improve without time taken increasing, but somehow I doubt that will be the case._


	7. Chapter 7

_A/N: Still sick and in the middle of midterms. I'll update catch as catch can, so you may get very short chapters... like this one!_

* * *

"Sir? I have the update you requested," the buzz-cut lieutenant – Raoul, his uniform read – said with a sharp salute.

Rear Admiral Boris Michailovich nodded. The Normandy-class frigates had been – despite his vocal objections – approved for limited production and testing after nearly a decade in development. In a cruel twist of fate, the task had fallen to him to work on integrating the reconnaissance vessels into the 63rd Scout Flotilla, and the task was as dauntingly large as it was frustrating. There were procedures to change, policy to update, training operations to conduct... the list was huge, and he's _really_ have preferred another heavy cruiser instead.

"Good. How's progress?" he asked brusquely, mind on other issues.

"Going well, sir. The preliminary systems tests are done with the usual failure rate-" Raoul began before Michailovich spoke.

"That bad?" Michailovich interrupted, his brow raised, and the lieutenant cracked a smile.

"It _is_ new hardware, sir," he said apologetically, and held up a small slate he was carrying. "Still, Adams doesn't think it'll take that long to fix – he said something about modular components before it all went over my head."

Michailovich shrugged. "Engineers," he said dismissively. "What about the crew?"

Raoul tapped a button on the slate and nodded. "Flight Lieutenant Jeffrey Moreau jumped at the chance – well, figuratively speaking," he said with a grin, and Boris laughed. "Adams has enthusiastically agreed to stay on as chief engineer, and if you want my personal opinion, sir, you'd have to pry the posting from his cold dead fingers."

"Engineers," Michailovich repeated with a shake of his head. "And the rest?"

"Captain Anderson's been approved as CO by Admiralty, but that wasn't unanticipated," he said with a small shrug. "He forwarded his staff requests for your approval, as well."

"Did he? That was fast," Michailovich said with a scowl. "Anything out of the ordinary?"

Raoul nodded. "Most of them are no-brainers, though, sir. Doctor Karin Chakwas for ship's physician, for example," he said, and Michailovich nodded in recognition. "She has a long history of working with Anderson, and they do well together. Others I'm less sure of, sir. I've taken the liberty of marking approval on all the obvious choices, but there are several you'll want to examine yourself," he said.

Michailovich shook his head. "If you didn't know me so well, Raoul, I'd accuse you of usurping authority," he said absently as he scanned the list. "Aleko... Alenko... I know that name..." he said, tapping the stylus against his cheek.

"He's an L2 biotic with several technical certifications, sir. Well-spoken, as well, and has a good head for politics." He shifted uncomfortably.

Michailovich sighed. "I know you don't like the L2s, Lieutenant, and off the record I'm not happy with most of them myself – bunch of special-treatment sissies, if you ask me – but they've proved themselves too many times to write off."

Raoul nodded. "I know sir, it's just..." he trailed off with a helpless shrug.

Michailovich nodded. "I know."

"To be completely honest, sir, he's not my main concern at the moment," Raoul said slowly.

"Oh? Who is?" Michailovich asked, quickly scanning the approval marks that his lieutenant had helpfully penned in for him. _I'd be screwed without him, _he thought absently as he ran down the list.

"Anderson wants Commander Shepard for his XO, sir. Last page," he offered at the admiral's scowl.

"Sheppard?" Michailovich asked as he flipped through the long document. "I thought they'd bumped him to Major and retired him," he said.

"Ah, no, sir. _Shepard_. Only one 'p', first name "L." Not an acronym," he said at the admiral's raised eyebrow. "She's a combat biotic, out of the Vanguard project, and graduated from the ICT with high marks."

Michailovich stared at him with a blank expression on his face. "She was involved with the siege on Torfan, sir, a couple years back?"

Recognition bloomed in the old Russian admiral's eyes and he swore. "Wait, _that_ Shepard? The Butcher?" Raoul nodded, and Michailovich shook his head. "Why in God's name does Anderson want _her?_ He's as straight-laced and goody-two-shoes as they come, and she sure as hell isn't!"

Raoul gave another small shrug. "He wouldn't say, sir."

Michailovich snorted. "Christ. Alright. Maybe he wants a counterbalancing influence, or something."

"To be fair, sir," his aide said calmly, "she's had an outstanding and, ah, uncontroversial record since Torfan, and her evaluations – both formal and informal – have been excellent. Her captain on the El Alamein spoke highly of her, sir. She apparently performed admirably in all assigned duties and got along well with the crew."

Michailovich rolled his eyes. "Of course she did," he said dryly.

Raoul tilted his head at the admiral in confusion. "Sir?"

"Never mind. Problems above your pay grade," he waved his hand dismissively and tapped the slate a few times before scrawling a signature. "Give that back to Anderson. Tell him I'm approving all of the requests except Shepard. I need to talk to the rest of the Admiralty about her before I let that one pass."

Raoul took the slate back and saluted. "Aye, aye, sir."

Michailovich nodded. "Anything else?"

The lieutenant shook his head. "No, sir."

The admiral leaned back in his chair and sighed, making a shooing motion toward the door. "Then thank you for the update, Lieutenant. Now clear out, I need to make some calls."

Raoul nodded and saluted again. "Of course, sir."

* * *

_Like I said: Super short chapter. This is about a third of what this section was supposed to be. I'll get the other parts finished in the next few days and post them. Here's to physics tests!_


	8. Chapter 8

_A/N: Another short one here. Meet our pilot and his friend, Lieutenant Alenko! _

_Probably two or three more short chapters (or 1-2 long ones) before we get set out for Eden Prime._

* * *

Kaidan Alenko was not, as a general rule, a pessimistic person. Dealing with brand new ships put that to the test, however.

The Normandy SR1 was an amazing, state-of-the-art machine with amazing, state-of-the-art problems. He couldn't for the _life_ of him figure out why turning on the lights in the bathroom triggered an overload alarm on the _cargo bay's_ illumination system. After spending most of the night reading badly-labeled wiring diagrams with a growing migraine, he eventually just threw caution to the wind and wired the restroom lighting into the hall lighting circuit and called it done.

Which had left him with a whole three hours of sleep and a full-fledged migraine.

Needless to say, he wasn't in the best of moods... which didn't make Joker's perpetual snark and teasing commentary any more appealing.

"Hey, Lieutenant," the flight officer said as he walked up to the cockpit and collapsed in the chair. "Sleep well?" he asked with a smirk.

"No, Joker, I didn't," Kaidan snapped at him, "but thanks for asking." He picked up his coffee mug with a huff.

"Whoa, hey, man, what's wrong?" Joker looked up from his slate, a concerned expression on his face.

Kaidan sighed. "Eugh, sorry, Joker," he apologized. "I was up most of the night with Adams trying to figure out why turning on the bathroom lights blows out half the circuits in the cargo bay."

"Shit, man, I'm sorry. I didn't know." To his credit, Joker seemed genuinely apologetic... which wasn't surprising, Alenko mused, given that he'd been complaining about pissing in the dark for nearly two weeks. "Did you get it working?" he asked tentatively after an awkward pause.

Kaidan snorted. "Yeah, but it's a hack. Tapped in to the hall illumination line."

Joker rolled his eyes. "State of the art spaceship and they still can't figure out how to wire lights properly," he said.

"Tell me about it. Hey, did we ever get the personnel roster sorted out?" Kaidan asked.

Most of the crew had been on-station on a tentative basis for nearly a month now, but for whatever reason the formal orders detailing their next assignment had been held up by wrangling between the admiralty and Captain Anderson. Kaidan was sure there was a story there, but lowly lieutenants – even well-connected ones – weren't privy to those kinds of discussions.

So they'd sat there, in a kind of bureaucratic limbo, trying to figure out how their new ship worked with bad documentation, fiddly electronics, and an incomplete roster. Kaidan had been politely asking Captain Anderson nearly daily if the roster had been finalized, until the Captain had finally told him to stop asking and focus on getting through the pre-launch training and checklists.

Which merely meant that he'd taken to asking people that hadn't been pestering the Captain as often. Fortunately for him, Joker was nearly as grumpy about their current unclear state of affairs, with the added bonus of being willing to piss people off until he got an answer.

Joker, much to Kaidan's surprise, grinned conspiratorially at him and nodded. "Did we ever," he said, gesturing at the slate he was holding. "Remember how I said this wasn't a normal assignment?"

"Yeah?"

Joker handed the slate to Kaidan. "Well, I was right. Check out the finalized roster."

"Huh," Kaidan said, flicking through the document. "Adams confirmed in Engineering... big surprise there... Charles Pressly as navigator? I don't recognize him."

Joker shrugged. "Old navy family."

"Connections?" Kaidan asked.

"Yeah, but he's good in spite of them."

He snorted. "Right," he said. "Anderson confirmed as CO, not sure why that wasn't done earlier..."

"I'm still surprised they picked him for it," Joker said. "Guy's a bit overqualified to be babysitting twitchy hardware, yannow."

Kaidan gave him a reproving glance. "Joker, the Normandy _is_ a brand new, top-of-the-line prototype. They're not going to hand her over to some freshly-promoted captain."

"Fine, fine," he waved his hand dismissively, wincing as his wrist made a dull _pop_. "Keep going."

"Karin Chakwas in medical, okay... _nice_ bunch of enlisted, I even recognize a few of them... whoa, Jenkins? Is that _the_ Jenkins?" Kaidan looked up from the list with a questioning eye.

Joker grinned and nodded. "The one and only," he said. "Try not to throw him around any more, I don't think he'll get lucky twice."

"You're never going to let me live that down, are you," he said with a sigh.

Joker laughed. "Not even a little."

Kaidan shook his head and looked back a the slate. "Executive Officer... Commander Shepard? Why is that familiar?" He scowled, wracking his throbbing brain.

"Yeesh, you really _are_ out of it, aren't you," Joker said.

"Joker..." Kaidan trailed off warningly.

"Okay, okay," Joker said, his smile fading. "Uh, she's a biotic, and a pretty strong one, too. She's an N7," he added, and he glanced up from the slate surprised – successful ICT graduates were rare, and N7s were the cream of the crop. Any soldier that made it through both the qualifying training programs and the mandatory "real world" operations were worth their weight in gold, and most of them were fast-tracked up the chain of command. He gave a small whistle, and Joker nodded absently.

"Yeah. Supposed to be pretty nice, too, but if scuttlebutt is right..." he shuddered for effect, which was impressive when one considered that random motions could easily land him in the med bay. "What, she cursed or something?" Kaidan asked.

"No," Joker replied seriously, and Kaidan raised an eyebrow at his tone. "You're still not getting it. Read her service record."

Scowling, Kaidan scrolled through the surprisingly long service record included in the file. _Let's see... served on the El Alamein doing scouting and S&R work... an antipiracy tour on the batarian border... wait, Torfan?_

He blinked and nearly dropped the slate. "Wait, she's _that_ Shepard?" he asked incredulously, and Joker gave him a grim nod. "And Anderson requested her," he said, disbelieving. Kaidan wasn't deeply involved in politics, but he wasn't a stupid man, and he knew that Torfan wasn't everything it had seemed to be. It was too... polished. Too cleanly done, despite how messy it had actually been.

He kept his opinions to himself, of course, but he couldn't help but wonder what exactly had gone on in the bowels of the batarian pirate base... at the same time, he wasn't entirely sure if he _wanted_ to know.

He liked thinking of the Alliance as the good guys.

Joker nodded again, unaware of his friend's train of thought. "Yeah. She's also in charge of the marine detachment and the ground team. Have fun, Lieutenant," he said with a more typical smirk.

"Thanks," Kaidan said dryly before glancing at the slate again. "Well, at least she's competent," he said, handing it back to Joker.

"No arguing with that," Joker said.

Kaidan rubbed his temples with a groan and hauled himself out of the copilot's seat. "I'm gonna go see if the med bay's stocked yet," he said. "Don't set anything on fire. I'm not in the mood to fix it," he warned with a waggled finger before walking down the hall.

"Do not set cockpit on fire, aye aye, sir," Joker called to Kaidan's retreating back.

Despite his headache, Kaidan smiled.

* * *

_Next time: Shepard meets the crew and has a talk with Anderson. Should be interesting._


	9. Chapter 9

_A/N: Decided to split meeting the crew and Anderson into two parts. It allows me to have fun with some of the crew. Poor Kaidan won't know what hit him... :3_

* * *

The shuttle was late, as military transport was often wont to be.

Shepard had amused herself for the first twenty minutes reading all the details she'd been given about her posting to the Normandy, then the next hour and a half memorizing them. She'd started working through elaborate survival scenarios in her head – _you are trapped on a desert island, how do you survive – _for another half hour before growing bored. Some logic puzzles on her omni-tool kept her entertained for another two hours, and counting the tiles on the ceiling – there were six thousand, four hundred and fifty-three – had filled out another forty five minutes.

After the fifth hour in the shuttle departure lounge, she was seriously considering opening her suitcase and taking out the well-packaged violin and practicing simply to stave off the ceaseless drudgery before a nervous attendant had the obviously frustrated N7 soldier that if she was willing to travel in a cargo transport they could get her out in the next half hour.

She'd jumped at the option, even though it had meant a six hour flight in cramped quarters on board freighter instead of on a comfortable shuttle... but it had gotten her out of the accursed waiting room.

By the time she'd finally arrived at the Normandy, it was roughly two in the morning local time and she'd been up for nearly twenty-two hours. Only a bored and tired looking guard had been there to greet her, and with the lights in the dry-dock cycled off, she hadn't been able to get a good look at the exterior of the vessel.

It was somewhat surprising, then, to find that the Captain had stayed up waiting for her arrival.

* * *

"Commander Shepard," Captain David Anderson said as they stepped into his office. "It's been a while," he said, holding out his hand. "You've grown since I last spoke with you."

She nodded, taking his hand. "Yes, sir."

He gazed at her, eyes scanning every inch of her face carefully. He sighed and took a seat at his desk, and gestured for her to do the same. "You weren't really eighteen, were you," he asked, although his tone of voice made it clear it wasn't a question.

She smiled slightly. "No, sir."

"I didn't think so," he said, rummaging in a portable chiller next to his desk before grumbling softly. "Since we're off duty I'd offer you a drink, but I'm afraid the Alliance... _misplaced_... my stash again," he said with a crooked smile.

Shepard shrugged. "I'm not much of one for alcohol, I'm afraid," she said apologetically, and he shrugged.

"Your loss, Commander. How old were you, anyway?" He took a small pitcher of water from the fridge and set it on the desk, sliding a glass across to the commander.

She eyed him for a moment, evaluating his motive, before giving an internal shrug. _He already knows enough about me, knowing the whole story won't hurt._ "I don't know, sir," she said finally.

"You don't know?" he echoed.

"No, sir," she repeated. "I spent my whole life on the streets. My ID says I'm twenty seven, realistically, I'm probably closer to twenty four or twenty five."

He shook his head sadly. "Which meant you enlisted at fifteen or sixteen," he said. "Too damn young, if you ask me."

She shrugged. She'd had this debate with other people before, and had no interest rehashing the argument with her new CO... even if he didn't seem to mind informal discussions with his subordinates. "I disagree," she said politely.

"You would," he snorted, setting his drink down and lacing his fingers together on the desk.

"Sir, if I may ask a question..." she began hesitantly, and he nodded. "Why me? The orders said I'd been requested as your XO. Most captains want their executive officers to be someone who thinks like they do, to carry on in case they're incapacitated. I saw your face at that interview, whatever it is. I know you don't approve of what I do. If you don't think much of me, why would you request me?" She gave him a slight sneer. "To keep the crazy woman away from the unsuspecting soldiers?"

"Nothing like that," he said with a shake of his head. "On the contrary, Commander, I think quite highly of your skills, and I know you're trustworthy... or at least rational."

"But you know _me_," she said, "and I know you don't like me as a person."

He sighed. "To be frank, Commander, I'm not sure how much of a person there is to _like_," he said, meeting her eyes steadily.

She shifted back, affronted. "_Sir._"

He raised an eyebrow. "You're offended?" he asked.

"Sir, I'm a person, last I checked," she said, her tone bone-dry.

He shook his head, his expression strangely intense. "Are you? People have feelings. People have emotions. People _care_," he said firmly, and she shrugged.

"I could make you think I cared," she said.

He snorted. "I doubt that."

"Then why request me, sir?" It was her turn to lean forward intently. "If you're not trying to shackle me, and you can't stand me or what I do, why did you ask for me to be your XO? Not that I'm ungrateful for the opportunity," she said quickly. "The Normandy is definitely an _interesting_ vessel."

He drained his glass, and glanced at it with a look that Shepard strongly suspected meant that he wished it was full of vodka or whiskey instead of ice water before responding. "Because you're good at it," he said finally.

"Good at what, sir?" she asked.

"Good at making people think you care," he said, and looked at her. "You're cold, Shepard. Colder than anyone I've ever met... and that includes the council SPECTREs I've worked with. You'll cheerfully make nice with everyone you meet for years, and stab them in the back without a second thought if it helps you."

"I haven't done that," she protested.

He laughed humorlessly. "Tell that to the soldiers at Torfan."

She glared at him. "That's not fair, sir. I had second thoughts."

"I'm sure you did," he scoffed.

"I _did,_ sir." She folded her arms and leaned back in her chair. "That doesn't change what the right choice was."

"Hmph," he said with a shake of his head before waving a hand dismissively. "Point is, Shepard... you can do that. You make the calls that other people won't, or can't, and people respect you in spite of it. Maybe," he admitted with difficulty, "even because of it."

He cleared his throat. "You're also organized, efficient, trustworthy... in your own way, at least. When someone gives you an order, you'll follow both the letter and the spirit of it, and you certainly don't seem to care for personal glory. In that sense," he said, "you're an ideal XO."

Shepard raised an eyebrow at the older captain. "Thank you, sir. I think."

He chuckled. "It wasn't an insult, Commander."

She nodded. "Then thank you, sir."

"Just the truth," he said, brushing her thanks aside with a wave of his hand.

They sat in silence for a while. Not a companionable silence, but not a strained one, either. Anderson quietly poured himself another class of water.

"Do you mind if I ask you a personal question, Shepard?" he asked suddenly.

"No, sir."

"Why'd you join the Marines? You're smart, Shepard, everything in your record says so. You could have gone anywhere else and been successful, I've no doubt."

She gave him a crooked smile, rare in its honesty. "Could I, sir? I'm not educated. My identification is, as you said, obviously forged. I have next to no marketable skills, unless you know someone looking for an amateur violinist with ten years of experience in gang territorial defense," she said and he chuckled.

"I'd just committed mass murder, admittedly in self-defense. How many groups in this day and age will take a biotic with no questions asked and have the authority to make local problems 'disappear'?"

Anderson sighed. "Just the military."

She nodded at him. "That's what I figured, too, sir. I got a pretty good deal out of it: They paid for my amplification surgery, fed me, housed me, trained me, and educated me. In exchange, I have to fight for them. My odds now are still better than they were back on Earth... and it's less likely to land me in jail."

She leaned back in the chair and raised her glass at her new captain. "All in all, sir, it's not a bad deal, and I _am_ quite good at it," she said with a predatory grin.

"Hackett mentioned your deal with him. Three full tours of duty and you're done?" he asked, his voice neutral.

"Yes, sir. Twelve years, then I can walk away."

"Will you?" he asked.

She glanced at him incredulously. "Why should I stay, sir?"

He set his glass down and leaned forward on the desk. "Well, you're good at it, for one," he offered.

She rolled her eyes. "I'm good at a lot of things, now. I could go back to music. I could enter private employ."

"A mercenary," he said flatly.

She shrugged. "Call it what you will. I could get a formal education – twelve years of service buys a decent college degree. You yourself said I have the smarts for it," she said. "In all seriousness, sir, I like living. High-risk soldiering isn't a good way to stay alive."

"With your biotics, you're not exactly getting blown to pieces on a regular basis," he said slowly.

"I'd be even _less_ likely to be blown up outside of combat zones, sir. It only takes one mistake, sir, just one." She sat back, silent for a moment as she examined the ceiling, before giving the captain a curious glance.

Anderson sighed. "Alright, Shepard, let me put my cards on the table: You're _damned_ good at what you do, no matter what I may think of you personally, and it would be a real loss to the service to lose you. What could make you stay on past three tours?"

She raised an eyebrow at him. She hadn't expected him to be up front with her like that. Most people weren't willing to simply _tell_ her what they wanted, they always had to go beating around the bush to save their precious ego or reputation.

It was tiresome, which made Anderson's blunt question quite refreshing. She leaned back in her chair, lips pursed in thought.

"It'd have to be quite something," she said slowly after a long pause. "The life expectancy for N7 graduates on active duty is twenty-eight. I'm confident that with my skills I'd manage better, but nobody beats the odds forever. Let's be generous and assume I'll make it to forty."

She began rolling her empty water glass in her hands, watching the light reflect across the intentional irregularities in its internal structure. "The life expectancy of a middle-class human in a private sector job with low stress and few vices is nearly a hundred and fifty years. If you could prove to me that there's an experience worth having in the military that fits eight years of civilian experience into every year spent soldiering, then I'd consider it."

Anderson stared at her.

"Oh, you could also go back on the terms of my deal with Hackett," she said casually. "But... if I knew I was going to die in the service shortly because you had no intention of releasing me, well... let's just say I wouldn't put a whole lot of faith in my loyalty from then on," she said with a cold smile.

He shook his head slowly."Something interesting. That's it?"

She glanced up from the glass and nodded. "Pretty much, sir."

She didn't add that there was one other case that she'd stay on for: If they could prove to her that she was doomed, without exception, before she'd get the chance to live our her life, she'd stay. _But I'm not going to tell __**him**__ that,_ she thought to herself. _Don't want to give him any ideas. He might not act on them... but I'm almost certain someone else __**would**__._

Shepard smiled politely at her captain, slipping her mask back on before setting the empty glass on his desk. "If there's nothing else, sir, I'd like to rack out. Travel here from Arcturus wasn't exactly restful."

He gave himself a small shake and nodded at her. "Of course, Commander. I'll see you in the morning. We'll introduce you to the crew then. Take any of the open sleepers, they're all set up for use." She nodded at him, and walked for the door.

"Oh, and Shepard?" he called to her when she reached the door.

"Sir?" she turned, raising an eyebrow at him.

"Welcome aboard the Normandy," he said formally.

"Thank you, sir."

* * *

Alone in his cabin, Captain David Anderson rubbed his eyes wearily as the electronic paperwork for her SPECTRE candidacy flashed up on his terminal.

"We are so _fucked,_" he groaned to himself.


	10. Chapter 10

_A/N: Oh man oh man oh man I am so sorry this took so long. I had midterms... and then illness... and then the first draft I wrote for this chapter was absolutely terrible, so I started over... anyway. Here it is!_

* * *

Shepard's morning routine was (usually) fairly consistent.

Her day began at 0630 with alarm on her omni-tool pulling her from slumber. It never pulled her from dreams, though – if she had them, she never remembered what they were. Sometimes she'd wake up feeling a little sad, or cheerful, or worried... but whatever the cause was, the feeling passed quickly enough. Any phantom emotions she carried from her subconscious were quickly drowned out by the real ones inflicted by the world.

She would get up from bed, or in this case, out of her pod, and get dressed. She didn't sleep in clothing if she could help it. While there was certainly a security in being dressed while sleeping, it was one of the few concessions she made to comfort. After dealing with badly-fitting clothing, rashes, fleas, bedbugs, and other parasites while growing up in the name of security, she was overjoyed – still, even after a decade of service – to feel safe enough to be able to sleep without wearing anything.

This wasn't to say she slept with no _weapons_ nearby, of course. She always kept a knife and (when she found out about them) a taser-capable omni-tool nearby wherever she rested. Just because she trusted the security of the Systems Alliance didn't mean she was giving up _all_ personal responsibility for her safety.

Some people had photographs of loved ones as comfort items in their pods or bunks, others small tokens of affection from relatives, and she'd known one soldier who actually had a small stuffed animal that he always grabbed before hitting the rack. She had her comfort weapons, and even if there wasn't much logic to them, she still didn't sleep well if they weren't there.

The second thing in her morning agenda was a workout. She'd don sweats and a sports bra, and make for whatever gymnasium was available. If there wasn't one, she'd usually settle for running laps through the hallways of whatever ship she was serving on.

The morning runs also served as training for her biotics, as well. Instead of carrying weights like some soldiers did, she simply removed her amplifier and used her biotics to artificially increase the mass of her limbs and body as much as she could. Not only did this help keep her in shape, despite the cramped quarters normally found on frigate-sized vessels, but it also improved her focus – and when her survival depended on her ability to focus her mind, working on focus was just as important as maintaining her weapons and armor.

Her workouts had garnered a few odd looks from the crew of the El Alamein at first, but a few of the marines had joined her, and it rapidly became an accepted ritual of of the ship – every day, around 0700 hours, a small group of marines and crew members would be jogging behind a faintly glowing woman half their size.

She had no such established ritual on the Normandy, but she already liked the layout. The cargo bay was large enough to actually run laps in without having to duck through engineering, which was an improvement over the last posting.

Mindful of the time, she finished her workout quickly and headed back up from the empty engineering deck to the crew level for her favorite part of her morning ritual: The shower.

Ever since the advent of modern gravity-confined fusion power plants, running water had ceased to be a limitation in space. Compared to the power required to accelerate a vessel to entry velocity on a mass relay, the power require to run water through a reverse osmosis filter was trivial. As a result, the hyper-frugal "naval shower" had passed quietly into history, much to the joy of sailors everywhere.

Shepard, for whom warm showers had always been a treat rather than a fact of life, always made sure to enjoy them whenever the opportunity presented itself. Shepard wasn't religious, although she'd always agreed with the "cleanliness is next to godliness" line. A long warm shower, in addition to soothing workout-sore muscles, paid homage to that mentality.

The crew deck had still been empty when she'd gotten up, which surprised her somewhat, but she'd paid it no real thought before grabbing her kitbag and a change of clothes and marching off to the showers.

* * *

Kaidan Alenko groaned, thumbing the dismount switch on his sleeper pod. It opened with its usual hiss and servo-motor hum, and he winced as he took a deep breath of the arid shipboard air.

The pod compartment itself was empty., but he heard the murmur of morning conversations echoing up the passage from the table that served as their lounge and mess hall. A quick glance at his chrono told him that he'd slept through his alarm... again. He sighed and checked it.

_Wait. I **know **__I set that alarm. What the hell?_

"Ah, you're up," a warm, female voice said said from the table, and he blinked the sleep from his eyes as he searched for the source.

"I saw the silly hour you set your alarm to, and took the liberty of changing it," the older, white-haired woman said with a kind smile. "I know you marines like to push yourselves, but we're in _dry dock_. There's no sense in enduring another day of headaches from sleep deprivation."

"Doctor Chakwas," he said, proud of himself for sounding mostly coherent. "You changed my alarm?"

"Yes and no," she admitted. "I had Captain Anderson change it after you went to bed last night. You really should get more rest, young man," she said sternly.

"Yes, ma'am," he replied automatically, and shook his head. "Although while I appreciate the extra sleep, I _do_ have work to do," he said reproachfully.

"Medical needs take priority, especially when we're docked," she said firmly. "Also, check the schedule. The refit was changed to 1000 instead of 0800."

He blinked and glanced at his tasks for the day – sure enough, someone had moved the scheduled refit for one of the core charge monitoring units back two hours, giving him enough time for his normal morning rituals if he hurried, despite oversleeping. He glanced up at the doctor, his expression grateful. "You arranged for this?"

Doctor Karin Chakwas shook her head. "I'd love to claim credit, but no, Anderson did it last night after we turned in. I think he was up late and wanted his sleep," she said with a sly smile.

"Well, regardless what the reason was, it means I can get a shower before we start," he said with a smile and hopped out of the pod, rolling his eyes at Chakwas' appreciative hum.

"Really, Doctor? Ogling your patients?" he said, still smiling as he threw a towel over his shoulder and headed for the showers.

She laughed. "I'm old, not dead, Lieutenant. Tell whoever is in the shower that it's toast and eggs for breakfast again," she said.

Kaidan scowled and looked around the pod bay. "You saw someone in the showers? Everyone's personal stuff is still here," he said skeptically.

She shrugged and took another drink of her coffee. "Guess I was hearing things, then. Go on, get, or the food will be cold," she said with a flip of her hand.

He smiled at her and headed for the showers.

* * *

She flicked a lock of red hair out of her eye and reached for the small bottle of cinnamon-scented concentrated soap she'd taken a liking to. She didn't used to have long hair – in the reds, everyone kept their hair as short as possible – but with bedbugs not a regular problem, she'd indulged herself and grown it out a bit.

She was just rinsing the last of the soap out of her hair when the door to the shower hissed open behind her.

Her reaction was as automatic as it was fast, the product of a youth spend on the street and a decade in the military. Her left hand darted out to the shelf with her kit bag, reaching for the rubber-handled knife she _always_ kept within arm's reach while the telltale blue glow of activated element zero gathered around her palm that was rapidly approaching the unsuspecting soldier's nose.

Luckily for both of them, her conscious mind decided that the second half of the reflexive maneuver – the sudden approach and slice with the combat knife – was probably something that warranted fore-brain approval before executing, and she stopped herself from the vastly more lethal followup strike just in time.

_Well. You had to start meeting the crew __**sometime**__, didn't you, Shepard, _she thought to herself as she set the knife back on the shelf, kneeling down by the stunned soldier she'd just assaulted.

* * *

Kaidan never knew what hit him.

One moment he was walking toward the shower door, the next he was flat on his back with a somber-looking naked woman leaning over him, a hand under his chin and another snapping gently in front of his eyes. She was saying something, but his ears weren't quite working yet, and his nose _hurt._

"I said, can you hear me?" she said, her voice serious... and strangely gentle, he thought muzzily.

"I, uh," he said incoherently, blinking water out of his eyes. _Damn_ his nose hurt. And his head.

Proper cognitive function returned to him in a rush, and he blushed slightly. "Ah shidb, ma'ab, I'b sobby-" he said, scowling as he realized that he didn't recognize the woman kneeling over him... and that his nose wasn't working properly.

"Commander L. Shepard, marines," the woman said at his scowl. "I'm your new executive officer," she added at his continued confusion. He blinked in recognition, and tried to lift his hand to salute.

She laughed and knocked his arm back down. "Don't try to move," she advised in a more apologetic tone. "I thwacked you pretty hard. Here," she said and stuffed a folded up towel under the back of his skull. "Lie back."

He did as ordered, wondering why she was holding a thumb up to his face and closing an eye before a fresh spike of pain tore through his nose, and he tried to grab his face.

"Sorry about that," she said as she grabbed his hands to prevent him from touching his face. "I wanted to get that set properly before it started to swell. Trust me, it hurts less this way." He winced and reached tenderly for his nose, pulling his fingers away with a a smear of blood.

He glanced up at the woman, and she rubbed an embarrassed hand behind her head. "I'm sorry about the nose," she said awkwardly. "you startled me something fierce," she explained a bit sheepishly.

"Ah'b sobby," he said, wincing at his words before trying again. "I'm sorry," he managed after a moment, proud for sounding less like a toddler, and she smiled at him.

"If anyone needs to be making an apology here it's me, mister..." she trailed off, an eyebrow raised.

"Alenko," he said quickly, realizing she didn't know his name. "Staff Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko," he said more slowly.

"Right, Lieutenant," she said. "Like I said, if anyone needs to be apologizing here, it's me. I'm pretty sure you weren't expecting a fist to the face when you stepped into the shower this morning," she said with a slight smile.

He gave a weak chuckle and shook his head, wincing at the pain the slight movement brought to his abused nose. "As you say, ma'am," he said.

She nodded and put her hands on her knees, standing from a crouch in one smooth motion. "Wait here, I'm going to fetch the ship's doctor," she said, heading for the door, pausing at the control. "The ship _does_ have a doctor on board, yes?" she asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Ah, yes, ma'am. Doctor Karin Chakwas," he said. "But, uh," he said with a blush, glancing down at her naked form.

"Huh? Oh," she rolled her eyes and grabbed a towel off the rack, wrapping it briskly around her waist. "Don't go to sleep, Lieutenant," she said, slipping out the door.

He leaned his head back on the towel with a slight groan, staring up at the ceiling of the shower.

_If there's a worse way to meet your new executive officer, I can't think of one, _he thought with a sigh as he fingered his tender nose.

* * *

_Well, that could have gone better, _Shepard thought as she padded softly out of the shower and headed for the medical bay, peering in through the window.

"Interesting uniform, Commander," Captain Anderson's voice called from the table in the mess hall, and she spun about to face him. _I guess I'm flashing the whole crew today. Lovely._

"My apologies, sir," she said quickly. "Is Doctor Chakwas here?"

"That's me," a white-haired older woman across the table from him said with a nod. "Is something wrong?" she asked, her kind voice concerned.

"Lieutenant Alenko startled me in the shower," she explained in a hurry, "and I'm afraid I broke his nose."

Chakwas laughed and stood. "I told him someone was in there," she said as she headed quickly for the shower. "Serves him right for not knocking."

Shepard smiled as she trailed after the doctor, while Anderson covered a grin with his hand.

* * *

Kaidan winced in pain as Chakwas ran gentle fingers along the edge of the his now swollen nose, and she hissed in sympathy. "Definitely broken," she said. "Doesn't look out of place, though. Did somebody set this already?"

Shepard nodded. "It's easier if you do it before it starts to swell," she said.

"Well, it certainly makes it hurt less," Chakwas said. "Did you hit your head, Lieutenant?"

"No, the Commander did," he replied drily, and Chakwas laughed while Shepard looked vaguely embarrassed.

"True enough, Alenko, true enough. I don't think you have a concussion, and your neck looks fine, so let's get you down to medical for some anti-inflammatories."

Kaidan stood with a groan, rubbing his neck and rolling his head slightly before nodding politely at the Commander and following Chakwas to the medical wing. The door slid shut behind them with a hiss.

Shepard shrugged at the empty room, hung the towel up by her clothes, and went back for the second half of her shower. She'd go apologize properly later. It wouldn't do to have him upset with her, and it wasn't like it cost _her_ anything.

* * *

_Systems Alliance survival rule #74: Do not startle N7 operatives._


	11. Chapter 11

_A/N: This took something like four rewrites. I'm still not happy, but the sooner I get it posted the sooner I can get to the parts that DON'T make me want to set my keyboard on fire. I'm also almost certain I missed some important stuff I wanted to include here for foreshadowing but... can't win them all._

_I'm going in to finals soon, which may slow my update rate, but it should still be faster than it has been. I like to do at least one 3k word update a week. Helps keep things fresh._

* * *

Compared to her first meeting with Lieutenant Alenko, the rest of the introductions were downright boring. She met people, smiled politely, shook hands and saluted where appropriate, and began filing names and faces away. She made note of who seemed wary of her (thirteen), who seemed to take her at face value (eleven), and those who hadn't heard of her before now (four).

Leading the ship's marine complement was nominally Kaidan's job, but he had happily agreed for her to do it. He knew the value of experience, and how much the troops would look up to her... strange reputation or no, she still was an N7 graduate, and they were widely known for being the absolute best of the best. In return, he took over some of the personnel management duties that normally fell to the XO. The same reputation Shepard had that made her feared by her enemies often made her allies wary of approaching her, no matter how polite she was, and it was important for the XO to be someone the crew could work comfortably with.

All in all, the arrangement suited her. The marines themselves had no problem with it – Richard Jenkins was downright ecstatic at being able to work with Shepard, which amused her slightly – and Anderson had approved the arrangement with a wave of the hand and a brief "fine, fine" before dealing with the countless other problems that piled up on his desk.

To say that Shepard liked or disliked the crew would be a slight misstatement. They simply _were_, and their idiosyncrasies and personalities were things that had to be worked around... or taken advantage of, as the situation required. In that sense she was appreciative of the traits that made her job easier, and frustrated by people whose natures put them in constant opposition to her goals and methods.

In that regard, her favorite – or, rather, least upsetting – member of the crew was the chief engineer, Greg Adams. He kept his subordinates well-disciplined and trained without earning their ire, ensuring that the the ship's drive would always be watched by a cohesive team. He did his job professionally and without complaint. He kept out of politics, didn't second guess directions, and didn't cover up mistakes to guard his reputation or his ego.

Shepard liked that kind of person. They could be relied upon.

She didn't mind Chakwas. The woman was kindhearted and compassionate, a feat in and of itself for a military doctor of her age and accomplishments. Most of the crew – and more importantly, Captain Anderson – seemed to like her well enough, and Shepard had to fight off the lingering suspicion that always rose in her whenever she came across somebody who seemed genuinely altruistic. In Shepard's experience, people who gave of themselves to others with no recompense beyond the happiness they felt in doing so were _incredibly_ rare, and that made anyone who acted like it automatically suspect.

Of more immediate concern, however, was that this kind older woman was the Normandy's chief medical officer... which meant that, in the event that she was injured, she would be the one reading her _highly_ classified medical file. The complete one, with all the care instructions and "deviation from norm" bullet points, not the generic one available for public consumption.

The previous doctor on board the El Alamein had an... _understanding..._ with Shepard and Admiral Hackett. Shepard didn't know the details – Hackett had said they weren't relevant, and her prying hadn't been able to get a straight answer – but the doctor's barely contained disgust (or fear, Shepard wasn't entirely certain) of her had been obvious from the start. They'd worked together with gritted teeth, although it helped that Shepard was almost never seriously injured enough to warrant more than a quick scan and a muscle relaxant or minor bandage job.

Shepard didn't think the doctor was the grudge-bearing type... but she didn't know whether or not the doctor's seemingly kind and gentle demeanor would mesh with the knowledge of who – and what – Shepard really was.

She found Charles Pressly, the ship's navigator, to be quaint in a sad sort of way. His strict discipline, staunch traditionalism, and conservative nature was so stereotypical of old Alliance military families that Shepard had almost laughed when speaking with him.

To his credit, he was at least aware of his biases and foibles, which moved him out of the "dangerous" category and into the "foolish" one. Everybody had prejudices and biases, and Shepard knew she was no exception. They weren't particularly dangerous unless they interfered with the ability to make sound choices about the optimal path forward.

It was the same with personal ambition: She had no problem with soldiers who were motivated by self-gain, so long as the motivation didn't compromise the success of the task assigned to them. They could brown-nose whoever they pleased, as far as she was concerned, so long as they did what was asked of them.

What made the navigator's biases foolish wasn't that they existed, but rather how little _thought_ had gone into them.

She sighed to herself mentally.

Humanity was not alone in the galaxy, and hadn't been for years. There was no grand war, no "alien menace" to fight. There were simply _people_. People with different motivations, different values systems, and different hormonal responses... but people nonetheless, and they reacted like people. If you stabbed them in the back to climb higher, you would reap only hatred and treachery in return down the road. On the other hand, if you just helped others up, you would be left behind as the others climbed higher. They had just as little love for you as you did for them.

Humanity could not succeed, or even survive as a member of the galactic community, by clambering over the bodies of the people they'd killed to get there. The batarians had tried, and she had personally helped strike the blow that had led to their retreat from the rest of the galaxy. Nor could humanity simply help others, as that path led to the fate of the volus, the hanar, and the elcor: Nominally members, but marginalized and left out of all real decision making.

No, if humanity was to succeed, it had to prove themselves valuable, dangerous, and compassionate... all at the same time. Like the asari, she thought. Valued for their skills and wisdom, feared for their prowess in battle, and accepted for their benevolent tendencies. They had to become someone you wanted on your side and _didn't_ want as your enemy. It was Shepard's opinion – formed after ten years of interaction of all sorts with humans and aliens alike – that humanity had neglected its "good citizen" appearance in favor of the "unpredictable thug." As a new race, humanity wasn't exactly swimming in galactic currency and goodwill... but that didn't mean it was weak, and the human race could be working a lot harder to involve itself beneficially with the rest of the galaxy.

To Shepard, the galaxy and the things in it were _interesting._ Simply put, the galaxy was where all the stuff she cared about happened. She didn't want to be cut off from it by the prejudices of others or by the territorial pissing contests of hormone-driven foreign policy.

She appreciated the power of leading by example. Seeing another person accomplish great things in a certain way was more likely to encourage them to act in a similar fashion.

So shortly after the battle of torfan, when her name became fairly commonplace in the military forces of the galaxy, she began shaping her public image into what she wanted humanity to be seen as, the balance of traits that she believed would ensure humanity's – and more importantly, her – access to the wonders of the universe.

She was polite to strangers, honest when she made promises (if someone could find out), kind to those less fortunate... and as utterly ruthless to those who threatened her. She pulled no punches, fired no warning shots, and made no apologies for her actions.

The salarians really, really, _really_ liked her.

Which brought her back to Charles Pressly. He was, sadly, a product of another age, and it showed. Instead of being polite to strangers – or aliens, in this case – he was suspicious and hostile. Instead of being kind to those less fortunate, like the vagabond quarians, he was disdainful. Instead of being as effective as possible in battle, he subscribed to moral codes of behavior that restricted what was right or wrong to do.

It was a pity, really. He'd simply been born a century (or three, or four) too late, and traits that would be marks of strong character in another era were dangerous anachronisms in this one.

Well. She'd work with the man, see if she could talk him out of it. She doubted she could – opinions like his were often as deep as bedrock, and just as difficult to budge – but the act of trying would be a mark in her favor, at least.

There was one last member of the crew to meet, however – the ship's pilot.

* * *

"I've saved the best for last, Commander," Anderson said as they left Pressly at his terminal to walk toward the cockpit.

"Oh?" Shepard raised an eyebrow at her captain, who seemed vaguely her curiosity, Anderson remained silent, only nodding his head slightly in direction of the pilot's chair.

It spun in place as they approached with a small whir – an obviously nonstandard modification – to reveal a short, poorly-shaved soldier with a leg brace and baseball cap on.

"Hey, Captain. Commander," he drawled in greeting with a nod at the two of them, and Anderson sighed.

"This sorry excuse for a soldier, Commander Shepard, is Flight Lieutenant Jeff Moreau," Anderson said, his tone weary.

"That's Joker to my friends," Joker interjected.

"-also known as Joker," Anderson finished with a silencing glare. "He's our main pilot, and luckily for him, he's damn good at his job or he'd be on the first shuttle home."

Joker winced. "Ooo, harsh, Captain," he said.

"Joker, would it kill you to be formal for once in your life?" Anderson said, exasperated.

Joker lifted a finger to his jaw, pretending to be deep in thought. "No," he said finally, "but it'd be taxing, and I have _explicit orders_ from Chakwas to 'take it easy.'" He gave the cast on his leg a brief tap.

Anderson threw his arms into the air with a disgusted expression. "I give up," he said. "Try not to kill each other. I'm going to go figure out why the VI won't stop paging me," he said with a wave of his omni-tool arm and walked toward his cabin.

She stared at Joker.

Joker stared back.

"If this is a staring contest, I want you to know you're going to lose so you might as well quit now," he offered casually without breaking eye contact. "'Cuz I can win staring contests with _stars_. They don't twinkle in space, yannow."

Shepard rolled her eyes, and Joker gave a small victory whoop. "HA! I win," he crowed, doing a little victory shuffle in his chair.

"Lieutenant, do you take _anything_ seriously?" she asked as he finished his hummed off-key victory song.

"Yeah," he said, his tone suddenly devoid of levity. "My job. I fly. I fly pretty well. I also like jokes, and don't like people that take themselves too seriously."

_Odd man._

"Fair enough," Shepard said with a slight nod. "Risky way to introduce yourself, though. What if I couldn't stand jokes?"

He shrugged. "Then I'd know not to make them in earshot of you earlier rather than later?"

Shepard chuckled, her mind whirring along. _He's either bold... or really doesn't care that I'm a superior officer._

Her laughter trailed off. "So, _pilot_," she said, stressing his title, "I've had a thoroughly confusing technical rundown from Adams, and a thoroughly unhelpful briefing from the Alliance brass. What do _you_ think of the Normandy?"

He pursed his lips slightly, a scowl on his forehead. "If it's anything like the simulators they've worked up... and I mean _if,_ those things are _never_ like flying the real deal... then it's a game-changer," he said, meeting her gaze with an intensive expression. "You ever read old books? Military fiction?"

Shepard shook her head. The reds had a lot of things in their camp, but a stock of fiction wasn't high on the list... especially not outdated fiction. The library had banned all of them after they got in a fight there, which hadn't helped matters.

"Right. Well, back in the mid-twentieth, they had these submarines," he said, launching into an eager explanation. "All different kinds, owned by different nations..."

He rambled on a bit about stealth systems, paradigm shifts, weapons platforms. Shepard filed it away for later, but wasn't really interested in the lecture – she was vastly more interested in the person giving it.

_Well, he certainly knows his field, but given the rest of the roster that's not surprising. _She gave a small mental shrug. At least she was fairly sure that his flippancy was part of his presented persona, rather than actual distaste for the military system. That was mildly reassuring: A petty rebel that got down to business when needed was easy enough to work with. Dealing with somebody who harbored real deep-seated issues with authority was difficult... and dangerous.

_Really, Shepard,_ she scolded herself, _Anderson's a lot of things, but a fool isn't one of them. He hand-picked most of this crew. He wouldn't take someone with that kind of problem here._

She nodded at him as he finished an example that involved him using an empty beverage container and his hat to show the positions of two underwater vessels fighting each other, complete with little vocalized explosion sound effects.

He tucked his hat back onto his head and drained the last of the drink. "What about you, Commander? What brings you here?"

About to launch into her usual tale about serving humanity, she stopped. _Wait. Why lie? You don't know squat, and he'd probably appreciate it more._

"To be perfectly honest, Joker," she said with a slight sigh as she leaned against the wall, "I don't know why I'm here. I mean, obviously because Anderson requested me, but as for _why?_" she shrugged. "No clue."

"Yeah, I get you," he said with a nod. "Pressly was going on about that earlier. Thinks there's some big secret, too much high-class talent to be stuck babysitting a new ship."

"I wouldn't go that far, but yeah, it's a little strange," Shepard said. "I mean-" she began.

"Commander Shepard, please report to the Captain's office," the ship's VI interrupted abruptly.

She shook her head. "On my way," she called out to the cockpit audio pickup. "A pleasure meeting you, Lieutenant," she said politely before turning to leave.

"You too, Commander," Joker replied to her back, spinning to face the console once again.

* * *

Anderson was leaning over his desk, a data slate sitting in the middle when she stepped into his office. "Good. Close the door, Commander," he said, and she tapped the panel with a slight frown.

He paused a moment, organizing his thoughts, before nodding to himself and gesturing at the walls around them. "You know this is a co-designed vessel, right?"

She nodded. That much, at least, had been in the initial briefing she had received back on Arcturus station. The Normandy had been a join research project between the Hierarchy and the Alliance. The turians were interested in some new ship layouts and possible fleet roles, but weren't inclined to risk their people on something that broke with tradition. The Alliance had the experimental nature, but had little experience building ships, and wanted the benefit of centuries of turian shipbuilding experience.

The result had been the Normandy class frigates: Taking a page from humanity's tactical books and the turians' engineers, it really _was_ a co-designed vessel... with all the advantages and disadvantages that bestowed.

Obviously, Anderson hadn't called her in to discuss inter-species construction efforts, however.

"Good. Well, the Turian Hierarchy wanted to have someone familiar with the internal workings of their military on board, see how the differences played out, and give a report back to the the Hierarchy."

Shepard snorted. The Alliance, no matter _who_ built the ship, would _never_ let another species – especially one they'd been at war with recently – on board their ships, especially when one of the few advantages the humans had was in tactics and shipside leadership.

"I can imagine that went over with the Alliance brass like a lead balloon."

Anderson chuckled. "You got that right," he said. "The Alliance told them where they could stick their 'military observer' since it was an _Alliance_ frigate, and that if the Turians wanted to see how they worked in practice, _they_ could shell out the credits to build one."

"Ouch, really?" she said with an exaggerated wince.

"Well, it was considerably more polite than that, couched in terms like 'operational security' and 'naval methodologies,' but that was the gist of it. The turians were _not_ happy."

"I wouldn't be, in their place. Toss millions of credits into a research project and then have your partner walk off with the result because he'd provided the raw materials?" She shook her head. "What did they say?"

"Well, rather than go at it with us, they went to the Citadel Council and asked for them to intervene," he said.

"The Council has carrots in addition to sticks in its arsenal, and they're nominally a neutral agency, so they offered to have a Citadel Council observer file the report. Neither the turians or the Alliance were happy, which of course meant that it was successful bargain," he said with a hint of a smile.

"However," he said, his expression sobering, "it does mean we're going to have a Council observer on board for our first mission at least. Probably the first few."

Shepard looked at him skeptically. "What kind of observer?" she asked, folding her arms across her chest.

"A turian SPECTRE," he said. "From the council Special Tactics and Reconnaissance group."

"Nice backronym," she said dryly.

"It sounds better than the Citadel Council Independent Tactical Investigative Agency, which is a closer literal translation of the name of the office," he said as they walked into his cabin. "Anyway, Nihlus Kryik will be joining us. Do you have any issues working with turians?" he asked her.

"None that I'm aware of, sir," she replied honestly, and he nodded.

"Good," he said, grabbing a data slate from his desk and heading back for the door. "The ship's VI was paging me to let me know that Nihlus' shuttle just docked with the shipyard. He'll be coming aboard shortly. You and I are going to meet him."

Shepard scowled. "Sir? Why both of us?"

"The yard crew wants all nonessential personnel off-board while they do drive maintenance," he said as they headed up the stairs for the airlock. "

She sighed. Yard workers really didn't like it when crews looked over their shoulder while they did maintenance work... just like the crew didn't like turning ships over to the yard for repair and refit. One became accustomed to all the idiosyncrasies of a ship, even one brand new like the Normandy, and figuring out the changes that the yard did (always with the best of intentions) was always a headache.

_Oh, well. It's better than the ship exploding mid-mission due to missed maintenance._

She followed Anderson out the door.

* * *

Shepard, like many biotics, had heard the rumors that circulated regarding people with her skills. There were those who conflated biotic ability with asari melding, and thought (erroneously) that it made human biotics psychic. There were the religious radicals – rare, but dangerous – who thought that it was magic obtained by bargains with dark powers.

Those were true in a sense, as it was the dark energy fields generated by element zero that allowed her to manipulate gravity, but somehow she doubted that was what they meant.

Still, there were times when she wished the rumors _were _true. She'd have given much to know what the sharp-eyed turian was thinking when he'd met her. She'd proven to be quite adept at reading human emotions, but she was by no means an expert on turian facial expressions... something that she made a note to fix when she had time.

Oh, she knew the basics, of course: A flaring of the mandibles indicated shock or surprise, a nod of the head was still an acknowledgment or sign of deference, and her translator picked up the sub-vocalizations that indicated things like amusement and sarcasm, but that was as far as her skills went.

Which, of course, made the introduction with the SPECTRE all the more frustrating, as he was paying an unusual amount of attention to her rather than to Captain Anderson. In a human, it would have been suspicious... but she didn't know enough about turians to tell if he was simply memorizing her features (she certainly was), or if there was some other motive behind his attention.

Anderson finished the formal introductions with his usual direct tone, and she reached out a hand. That much, at least, she remembered from her ICT "mustang" training program: Turians had adopted the handshake from the asari, who used it as a formal greeting between strangers long before humanity arrived on the galactic stage.

"Commander Shepard," her translator supplied over the almost metallic buzz that made up turian speech. "It's a pleasure to meet you," he said with a nod of the head.

"Likewise, SPECTRE Kryik," she said, stumbling slightly over the title. "I'm sorry, I'm not sure how to address you," she said.

"'Agent' or 'SPECTRE' if you're being formal, 'Kryik' or 'Nihlus' if you're being informal," he said reassuringly – or, at least, her translator gave his response as 'reassuring.' "I have a traditional military rank as well, but the Hierarchy recognizes that council authority supersedes that," he said, and Shepard raised an eyebrow.

_Is he being informative, or chiding us for our uppity natures? _She decided on assuming he was being helpful rather than insulting. _You rarely need to apologize for being polite_.

"The Alliance can be slow to change sometimes," she admitted. "Give it time."

"Maybe by your standards," the turian said. "To us, you adapt more quickly than we ever thought possible."

_Interesting. He doesn't hold the Hierarchy as infallible... unusual, for someone from the military. This might actually work._

She nodded respectfully at him, the approximate equivalent of a smile. Actual human smiles were often misinterpreted as expressions of shock or alarm, since the cheeks were in a similar place on the human face to the turian mandibles. The asari, despite sharing many physiological traits with humans, tended not to use open-mouthed smiles. They generally favored upper body language to express emotion rather than dramatic facial expressions. _Possibly because many species view the baring of teeth as hostile or threatening, rather than as a sign of amusement. I can't imagine why,_ she thought drily to herself.

In fact, the only other species that favored open-mouthed smiles for amusement were batarians... who also used it as a predatory expression. Salarians kept their mouths closed when smiling, turians simply didn't have the physiological capacity to smile, asari culture favored expressing amusement in other ways, elcor didn't have the flexibility to smile, hanar _couldn't, _and the drell were infamously reserved.

Well. The Vorcha smiled... although Shepard wasn't really sure they could actually close their mouths.

Finishing the gesture, Shepard looked back up at the turian. "You flatter us, Spectre Kryik," she said. "We're quite proud of our tactical flexibility. It's what makes us effective despite being weaker in absolute strength."

Nihlus gave a slight cough at the phrase, and Shepard wondered what it was that she'd said. _Flexibility?_ _I wonder if that mistranslated._

Anderson stepped in to the gap with a nod of his own. "I hate to rush things here, but we need to get SPECTRE Kryik's equipment stowed on the Normandy quickly," he said apologetically.

The turian tilted his head at Anderson. "Do you have the first assignment already, Captain? I was told that you were still doing final tests," he said.

He shook his head. "Not yet, I'm afraid," he said. "There's a problem with one of the drive core charge monitors, and they have to take the drive offline to fix it. The yard team wants the crew off the ship for the duration."

Nihlus nodded. "Let us not waste time, then," he said, lifting a rifle hard case while Shepard took the handle of his duffel. _I wonder if every military uses these,_ she mused as she hauled the alien-smelling canvaslike bag toward the Normandy_._

* * *

The weeks passed by in a blur.

Shepard was simultaneously busier than she'd been since ICT and bored silly. Everyone was either running around in a panic, or waiting frustratedly on things that were beyond their control.

She spent most of her free time sitting in the mess hall reviewing the material and procedures for operation of the Normandy – as executive officer, she had to be prepared to assume command at a moment's notice in case he left the ship or something happened to him. Not having a full understanding of what to do would likely get her killed, and dying due to her own stupidity was not high on her bucket list.

She also spent time training the marines complement. All the marines were quite skilled – even Richard Jenkins, who apparently had something of a reputation as a hotheaded and overeager FNG – but even the trained marines were just skilled individuals at the start. They needed to become a team that worked well together.

It was one thing to know the hand signals to indicate a halt and the standard approach for clearing a room with hostiles. It was another thing to know that due to a slightly damaged knee your heavy weapons operator preferred to drop his SAW on his right side before kneeling down to ready it, and that he needed cover on his left while doing so. Little details like that were nearly impossible to fully convey to the rest of one's team, and the team wouldn't remember them even if you could. The only reliable way to make sure everyone worked together was, sadly, lots of practice.

So Shepard had them running drills. She'd pushed supply crates into crude forts that the teams would try to clear or hold. She made _everyone_ participate in her morning run around the deck, because enemies on the ground wouldn't care if you'd been cooped up in a spaceship with lousy exercise equipment, they'd just thank you for making their jobs easier and shoot you.

More privately, she also began making her triage lists.

These were distinctly _not_ part of the leadership training offered by the Alliance OCS.

It was, quite simply, a mental catalog. She spent time to get to know each soldier, learned his name, his history, his relatives and his family. She learned the hobbies of the marines under her and what they liked and didn't like. She reached out and befriended them, made them trust her judgment, and respect her as a leader... even if they didn't like her as a person, although most of them did. They weren't cleared for the whole story, after all.

She also filed away their skills, their personality traits, the things that upset them, and their fears. She knew which ones slept soundly and which ones could doze through the apocalypse. She listened to their music in private and learned their mannerisms. She learned which ones could be inspired into a heroic sacrifice for the good of the team, and which ones would flinch.

She dug up blackmail on all the ones she could. She knew which ones had lovers they'd meant to keep secret, or which ones had a history with drugs or alcohol. Being a hand-picked team, there weren't many... but there were some, and it always paid to know what hooks she could get in her people.

It was all preparation for when she would have to make the "hard choices."

The hard choices really weren't, at least not to Shepard. If a sacrifice was the best way out of a situation, that was the path that was taken. "No soldier left behind" was an excellent morale-building story, and she paid lip service to it often, but in reality... it was far better as a tool to convince people with emotional attachments to do what she wanted than as actual _policy._

So she built her lists. She knew that Richard Jenkins was a colony kid with more courage than sense, and that if she needed a distraction, he was excellent – both for the relatively small loss his death would be for the Alliance and for his boisterous nature. She knew that Silas Crosby and Monica Negulesco were in a relationship, and that neither would take the other being sent to their deaths well.

And so it went.

Shepard didn't hate people – far from it. She enjoyed the company of others. They offered different views on the world, and identifying how she and the rest of the galaxy differed was a hobby she liked. It was with no malice that she ruthlessly prioritized the lives of her associates. To her, it was simply good planning. She would be remiss in her duties as a commanding officer if she refused to do so, because the truth was plain: Not everybody _was_ of equal value, and if the stated goal was "complete mission objectives with as many people alive as possible" then she would be negligent if she _didn't_ plan for things going wrong.

Shepard was many things, but negligent wasn't one of them.

If there was one quandary she couldn't figure out, it was the SPECTRE agent Nihlus Kryik – or Nihlus, as he'd quickly stated a preference for.

Frankly, while she wasn't sure why _she_ was on board – Anderson's invitation notwithstanding – she had even _less_ of an idea why he was. It would make sense to bring him aboard for the shakedown run, to see how the ship worked in a real-world situation. Having him on board for the final testing and systems tests made little sense... especially since he was a self-professed soldier, not an efficiency management specialist for training documentation authors.

Shepard sighed when she'd found out that she'd actually been asked to _fill out a survey_ on the instructional holo she'd been forced to sit through on the ship's emergency protocols. She didn't like being a soldier – the risk of dying was too high for her taste – but she'd far rather be a soldier than... whatever the title was for the person who created that kind of crud.

Unlike the rest of the crew, Nihlus hadn't had any tasks to conduct, although he'd made himself useful as far as he was able. As an observer, he also wasn't responsible for leading anybody, and had no need to integrate himself with the crew.

Which was why Shepard was _thoroughly_ confused – and increasingly suspicious – when he constantly 'turned up' where she happened to be working, or studying, or conducting drills, or doing her morning jog, or even when she left the _bathroom_ for crying out loud.

It was like she'd grown a turian shadow, and while she wasn't unnerved by it, she was definitely wondering what was going on. When she'd confronted him about it, he'd passed it off as coincidence... and she'd almost been inclined to believe him. After all, anyone actually sent to spy on her would do a _far_ better job!

It also wasn't without benefits. He'd been willing to volunteer as an anatomical dummy for her lecture to her troops on how to disable a turian without killing him... or how to kill a turian quickly, if needed. He'd also helped her run her the marine complement through a few scenarios, and demonstrated a few tricks that the SPECTRE training offered.

Which was strange, given that she was fairly certain that those techniques weren't general knowledge for a reason, and there was no chance in hell that any of _them_ would end up in the SPECTREs any time soon.

She sighed to herself. Well, if that was where he wanted to spend his time observing the Normandy, that was his prerogative... although she'd keep a close and careful eye on him, just the same.

* * *

"Commander, report to the briefing room immediately."

Captain Anderson's intercom-distorted voice was worried, and Shepard scowled as she set down her slate. She slung the towel she'd had behind her head on the chair and jogged for the stairs – Anderson was many things, but prone to dramatic and cryptic warnings wasn't one of them.

Which meant that there was a very real problem.

She slid through the opening briefing room door sideways, and slowed to a brisk walk as she walked toward Anderson and Nihlus.

"What's wrong?" she said without preamble as she approached the pair.

They both glanced at her, and Nihlus gave her a respectful nod which she hurriedly returned. "Bad news," Anderson said grimly. "Nihlus informed me that the SPECTRE intelligence office knows what our first mission is going to be," he said, and Shepard paled.

"We're compromised," she said immediately. "Nobody on board knows?"

He shook his head. "_I_ didn't know until Nihlus told me. I got a quick confirmation from Hackett when I asked about it, but..." he trailed off.

"Right. What do you need, sir?" she asked.

"We're leaving dock as soon as possible. I've already alerted the yard crew; they're not happy but were mostly done. I want you to go tell Pressly to set a priority course for Eden Prime, then have the ground team stand by for guard duty."

"And the mission?"

"Classified until we're clear of the station, Shepard, I'm sorry," he said, and she nodded. _Figures._

"I understand sir," she said, although she made it clear in her tone that she wasn't pleased.

"I figured you would. Go. I need to finish up with Nihlus and then figure out what else is going on with the admiralty." He gave her a rare salute, and gestured at the door.

She returned it in kind, spun on her heel, and ran off to prepare.

_Well._

_This should be interesting._

* * *

_A/N: Next up: Eden Prime!_


	12. Chapter 12

_A/N: Delay longer than intended. Three rewrites bad. Working to get stuff out faster. Must type type type type type._

* * *

"Pressly-" she began as she stepped out of the briefing room.

"Already on it, ma'am," he interrupted crisply, punching figures into the galaxy map.

"Good," she said as she jogged for the door, nearly knocking one of the sensor technicians over. "Sorry," she said as she plowed by the ensign, taking the steps two at a time.

She winced at the moment's dizziness that coursed through her as Joker brought the ship's mass effect core to full power. There _were_ downsides to having a chunk of element zero buried in your skull. Much like a piezoelectric crystal, refined element zero would also _generate_ electrical current when subjected to shifting gravitational fields... and having it buried in her head meant that a strong mass effect field could do all sorts of unusual things to her state of mind, from momentary unsteadiness to wild mood swings.

Of course, given the glial tissue that had built up around the nodule in her brain, if she was subjected to a mass effect field strong enough to do more than make her momentarily unsteady on her feet, then she had other problems to worry about – like what she would do about her brain getting smashed into paste against the inside of her skull by its own mass.

She punched the emergency override into the elevator, sending it – and her – down to the cargo bay in four seconds instead of the much more leisurely twenty it normally took.

"MARINES!" she bellowed as she stepped out of the cargo elevator bay, and she felt the gaze of the twelve soldiers in her squad snap to her.

"Get suited up," she said in a more normal tone of voice. "Guard/Escort loadout. We've got our first assignment, and we're leaving fifteen seconds ago."

The resulting surge of activity was suitably impressive. It was like somebody kicked a hive of bees, as soldiers leapt away from their card games, dropped half-eaten sandwiches, and left holos playing on portable displays while they ran for the equipment lockers.

"Ma'am? Any details?" one of the marines hung back to ask.

She shook her head. "We're headed for Eden Prime. No details until we're clear of the station, the brass is worried about operational security more than usual. We'll be on station in an hour tops, so move quickly."

"Understood, ma'am," he said with a respectful nod, then jogged off to join the rest of his squad.

The hurry was warranted. Even though Eden Prime was at least an hour out, even at full military speed, the crew would start preparing for the mission now. While modern armor and equipment had _vastly_ increased the survival chances of soldiers in the field, it was also not quick or easy to put on... especially if one was gearing for a potentially long-term mission.

It was strongly suggested, for example, to visit the restroom before putting on an armored jumpsuit. While the suit wouldn't be compromised by the addition of... refuse... to it, it was _not_ something you wanted to be walking in for hours, and taking off your armor while in a combat zone was a major no-no, even in planetary environments where it was possible.

Making the other plumbing connections wasn't exactly comfortable either, at least for women. Men were lucky and had less invasive options. Women simply had to deal with uncomfortable plumbing, or resigned themselves to thoroughly cleaning their armor suits after a long shift. Shepard was lucky in this regard – she wasn't as bothered by the plumbing connections as some were, although she wouldn't have called it _comfortable_ by any stretch of the imagination.

For short missions it was usually skipped, but Anderson's warning of "guard duty" meant that they might be active for eight or twelve hours, more if the target was high value and they were the ones trusted with watching it.

Other parts of gearing up for a mission took time, as well: Loading the armor's medi-gel reservoirs, topping off the charge in the superconducting coil that served as the armor's power cell, replacing the high-density air canisters, and running the full diagnostics. All of the steps could be skipped in case of an emergency deployment, but if you had the luxury of warning that a fight was coming, you didn't skip out on the chance to go fully prepared.

Not if you liked living, at least.

* * *

"-you hate him," Kaidan's skeptical voice drifted down the hallway as Shepard walked toward the cockpit.

"You remember to zip up your jumpsuit after you get out of the bathroom, that's good," Joker's said. "I just jumped us across the galaxy and hit a target the size of a pinhead. So that's incredible!"

He gave a derisive snort while Shepard padded silently up behind him, lacing her hands together behind her. "Besides, SPECTREs are trouble. I don't like having him on board. Call me paranoid."

"You're paranoid," Alenko said bluntly. "The Council helped fund this project. They have a right to send someone to keep an eye on their investment."

_Interesting,_ Shepard thought. Either Kaidan had been briefed more closely than she'd thought, or he was cleverer than she'd initially given him credit for. It wasn't perfectly accurate, but it was close, and that showed a lot more political savvy than most soldiers had.

"Yeah, that is the _official_ story," Joker said with more skepticism in his voice than Shepard had believed possible, "But only an idiot believes the _official_ story."

Despite Joker's rather well-known dislike of authority figures and agencies, Shepard was actually inclined to agree with him. Nihlus was _not_ the kind of representative you went to 'observe efficiency' in a new ship design. He was there for some other reason. What that reason was, she didn't know... but there was definitely something else going on.

"Well, they don't send SPECTREs on shakedown runs," she said from behind them, and they both gave a little jump as she spoke. _Gossiping without checking your six? Tsk, tsk._

Joker recovered quickly, nodding in agreement. "Which means there's more going on here than the Captain's letting-" he said, glancing at Kaidan before the comm interrupted him.

"Joker!" Anderson's comm-distorted voice was tense. "Status report."

"Just cleared the mass relay, Captain. Stealth systems are engaged, everything looks solid." Joker's response was – despite being a bit more casual than most soldiers' – completely respectful. _He's actually pretty good, _she thought absently as she processed the information he'd given the Captain. _No nonsense when it matters._

"Good," Anderson said. "Find a comm buoy and link me into the network. I want mission reports relayed back to the Alliance brass before we even reach Eden Prime." _Great, the Captain's nervous. That's never a good sign, no matter who he or she is._

"Aye aye, Captain. Better brace yourself, sir, I think Nihlus is headed your way." Shepard winced. She'd walked right by Nihlus heading up to the cockpit, and he hadn't headed for the stairs, which meant...

Anderson's voice could have dehydrated a desert. "He's already here, Lieutenant." _So much for being respectful._

Kaidan and Joker shared a tiny shake of their heads.

"If you see the Commander, tell her to meet me in the comm room for a debriefing." The comm beeped as Anderson closed the link.

Joker glanced up slightly. "You get that, Commander?"

"Yeah, I got it, Joker. Try not to bury your feet in your mouth any more, Chakwas is too busy to do boot extractions and the Captain's angry enough as it is."

The pilot sniffed. "He's always like that when he's talking to me," he said.

Kaidan shook his head and glanced at Joker. "Can't imagine why," he muttered under his breath, and Shepard snorted in amusement before stalking off to the communications room.

* * *

Shepard's amusement evaporated quickly.

Between Pressly's inability to see past his own prejudices – which normally wasn't a problem, except when he insisted on belting them out at nearly shouting levels across the entire CIC – and Jenkin's inexplicable presence on the upper deck instead of down below with the _rest _of his squad, more things were going wrong than Shepard was comfortable with.

Plus, Jenkins child-like attitude toward the world grated on her. She was a soldier; she would do what was required of her. There was nothing more to it than that. Well, perhaps slight satisfaction at tying up all the loose ends in a task nicely... but that was more a matter of professional pride and a boon to her reputation than any kind of glorified fantasy. To hear the man go on you'd think that they were all action heroes from some children's comic.

She was not in the best of mental spaces, then, when she finally walked in to the large circular briefing room above the elevator. She took some solace in the fact that she'd be getting some answers soon.

The door slid open with a pneumatic hiss, and she stepped through quickly. "Captain And-" she began.

She stopped quickly. The captain wasn't there.

Nihlus, however, was.

He was standing next to one of the side consoles, flicking idly through some document. At the door's hiss, he glanced up and gave her a turian smile – a slight nod of the head, a minor lift of the mandibles.

"Commander Shepard," he said, and his metallic voice echoed slightly in the empty room. "I was hoping you'd get here first. It will give us a chance to talk."

Shepard glanced pointedly around the room. Not because she didn't know what was in it – she'd given the room the same fast sweep the instant the door had opened – but because body language was a subtle thing, and even to those trained in reading it across species it could still be misconstrued or ignored altogether if one didn't take the effort to be obvious.

"The Captain said he'd meet me here," she added, in case he missed her gesture.

"He's on his way," he said dismissively. "I'm curious about this world we're going to... Eden Prime. I've heard it's quite beautiful."

His tone was distinctly questioning, which was odd. She was a _soldier_, not an artist, and the same unique traits that made her an exceptional fighter made her a rather poor artist.

To her, art was only relevant because other people cared about it. She understood the effort that went into it, obviously, but it didn't 'stir her soul.' When she looked at a painting, she saw a combination of techniques, both technical and emotional: Technical in the production of the work, and emotional in making something that others would understand and also feel.

It was simply another way to communicate to the viewer: The technique of the creator made the communication possible, and the objects painted were the message. As far as Shepard was concerned, they could have saved a lot of time and effort simply writing an essay on the feelings they had when looking out their window.

Still, he had asked her a question.

"I've never been there," she hedged. It was true, and she didn't know much of the place. Given the name, she supposed it probably was an classically beautiful idyllic place, but humanity often had a keen appreciation for irony. Shepard didn't like to gamble.

"But you know of it," he pressed. "It's become something of a symbol for your people, has it not? Proof that humanity can not only establish colonies across the galaxy, but also protect them. But how safe is it really?"

She scowled at him. She knew most of them, even the unconventional ones, disapproved of the Systems Alliance policy for protecting colonies. "If you have something to say, just say it," she said.

He shook his head. "Your people are still newcomers, Shepard, and the galaxy can be a very dangerous place," he said ominously. "Are you people _truly_ ready for this?"

_Ready for **what?**_

She opened her mouth to ask him, bluntly and with more disregard for protocol than she normally showed, what in the world he was talking about when the door hissed open.

"I think it's time we told the Commander what's really going on," Anderson said as he walked toward the pair.

Nihlus stepped forward. "This mission is far more than a simple shakedown run," he said ominously.

Shepard bit off a sigh. Of _course_ it was. Pressly was right; you didn't send a fully staffed crew on a shakedown run... especially not one where the mass of their medals had to be factored into jump drive equations. "I already figured that out," she said dryly to the turian.

Anderson cleared his throat, and the two looked back at the captain. "We're making a covert pickup on Eden Prime. A _working_ prothean communications becaon."

Shepard's eyes widened slightly. Prothean technology that was undamaged enough to determine its purpose was rare enough; finding actual _functioning_ technology was a once-in-a-century find... if that. The last relatively intact example of prothean technology that had been discovered in the galaxy was the Mars archive, and before that... well, she didn't actually _know_ the last major example of working tech before that. It had been centuries, at least.

Anderson smiled grimly at Shepard's obvious surprise. "The whole area's in lockdown, and has been for a week or two now. We were supposed to finish our tests and pick it up for our shakedown, but..." he trailed off, glancing at Nihlus.

"...I was informed by intelligence agents working for the SPECTRE office that they knew a sample of functioning prothean technology had been discovered on Eden Prime, and was being prepared for pickup."

Shepard nodded, understanding what had happened. "And if you knew, it had to be because we had a leak somewhere."

Nihlus chuckled. "Well, not necessarily. The SPECTRE intelligence teams do more than search existing data networks... however, I checked before speaking to your captain," he said, a hint of smugness in his synthesized voice.

"Which is why we're leaving drydock like we owe the commandant money," she said, and Anderson snorted.

"Indeed," Nihlus said. "However, the beacon's not the only reason I'm here, Commander."

She shrugged. "Anderson mentioned something about the R&D teams that codesigned the Normandy not seeing eye to eye, yes."

Nihlus glanced at Anderson, who shifted slightly before folding his hands behind his back and refused to meet either of their eyes.

The silence held for several breaths.

Finally, Nihlus flared his mandibles in a turian shrug and stared at Shepard. "It's more than that, Commander. I'm also here to evaluate you."

Shepard's mind whirled. _Evaluate me? For what?_

She thought quickly. _I've done nothing that would warrant an investigation by a SPECTRE. The batarians don't have a presence in council space, and the mess back on Earth is strictly a domestic problem._ She pursed her lips, not liking where her logic was leading her. _Which means that if I'm being evaluated, it's for a new position... only, I haven't volunteered for anything, and I __**know**__ my contract doesn't include getting promoted or reassigned to another branch of service against my will._

Her eyes narrowed imperceptibly.

_...which means they're going to force me to volunteer. The old leverage again, I wonder, or do they have something new? _The muscles in her face twitched, and she clamped down on her desire to sneer.

Nihlus spoke on, oblivious to Shepard's growing discontent. "Torfan was a grim business, Commander... but you got the job done."

He paused, and Anderson closed his eyes.

"That's why I put your name forward as a candidate for the SPECTREs."

For a moment, the words didn't register.

Then they did.

* * *

Anderson knew it was coming. He'd hoped he'd be able to talk her around before Nihlus dropped the metaphorical bomb, but she was – quite frankly – beyond his ken.

He was a good soldier, and a good leader. He knew when to crack down on unruly behavior, and he knew when to let things slide. He knew how to be good friends with his crew while still keeping enough distance for them to follow his orders without question. He was, by any reasonable metric, good at his job.

He had no idea how to handle Shepard.

He knew that she didn't think like the rest of the humans in the galaxy did. He'd seen the medical scans, listened to the psychologists talk, read the testimony – the _unedited_ testimony – of the soldiers who'd actually served with her on Torfan. But that really hadn't prepared him for how _alien_ her thought process was.

That was the best term, he realized belatedly: Alien. She wasn't evil, or cruel, just... different. Heartless, yes, but in the same way a butcher was heartless: It was their _job_ to kill things, and they went about it with a sense of... duty? Boredom? Professional pride? He wasn't sure.

What did a pig think before it went to slaughter, anyway?

He gave himself mental shake, and opened his eyes.

He was glad, in a way, that the person delivering the news wasn't human. For all the strides in inter-species relations, there were subtleties – in all the races of the galaxy – that were nearly impossible to pick up on. He figured that Nihlus would know something was up... but that he'd have no real clue what she _actually_ felt.

Which was good.

Her expression – normally a polite mask of caring and concern – lost all emotion, as if whatever puppet handle pulling on the muscles of her face had its strings abruptly cut. The slight worried crinkle near the corner of her eyes, the forward cant of her jaw, the barest tightening of her mouth... all the subtle hints that said "I'm listening, I care!" evaporated. They were just gone, as if they'd never been.

In its place, the ghosts of several emotions – real ones, he guessed – flitted across her face as she processed all the ramifications of what Nihlus had just said. There was surprise, then... hurt, maybe, or frustration and anger. Those vanished quickly, replaced by consternation... which finally yielded to the most terrifying emotion of all:

Conviction.

She'd just chosen her path, he knew. He didn't know what it was, but he doubted he'd like it. It probably resulted in a messy – and untraceable – end for him, and no few members of the Alliance brass who had helped organized this stupid plan from the beginning.

It really was a pity, he thought as he exhaled slowly. If he'd been able to find a way to get her to put the Alliance and humanity first... there was no telling what she'd have done. Great things. Terrible things, he had no doubt, but after all... polite and well-behaved people rarely made history.

* * *

Shepard did not feel rage.

She felt frustration, yes. Displeasure at a plan gone wrong, disappointment at opportunities missed. Satisfaction at things done well, or in her favor. Amusement at a cosmic coincidence or clever twist of words. Even friendship, in her own way.

But not rage. Rage was an inarticulate reaction to injury, be that injury physical or otherwise. She had been betrayed, yes, and in a fashion that would likely lead to her death.

To her, it was simply another reality to deal with. She would effect some kind of retribution, or threat thereof, to ensure that the same gambit was not attempted again. She would do so quietly, and cleanly, and as final insurance.

Contrary to popular belief, Shepard understood love. She understood how two people could grow to enjoy each others company, adapt to having each other in their lives to the point where absence was painful. She could understand the happiness derived from being with someone that shared your viewpoint and supported it. She didn't _experience_ it as such, but she _understood_ it.

Shepard didn't understand vengeance.

It was, to her, a waste: If someone took action against you, it was because you failed to provide sufficient disincentive for them to do so... or you were unable to do so. In either case, acting irrationally was not likely to improve your standing, and hurting them because they were not impressed by your deterrents was not productive by itself.

Shepard would not bring suffering to the people who had betrayed her because they had to suffer. That was pointless. She would bring suffering to them to ensure that nobody else would attempt to do so in the future.

Her expression hardened as she began formulating and rejecting plans. It would be tricky, she realized quickly: For the message to be effective, she had to be known as the cause... but for it to serve its purpose in improving her future lot in life, it had not to be traceable to her.

She was getting ahead of herself, she realized. There were steps to follow through, things that Commander L Shepard – the dedicated soldier for the Alliance – would say and do, things _she_ needed to say and do.

Her plans were not an immediate concern... and, she realized, they might not even be necessary. If she truly _was_ being considered as a SPECTRE, that would carry its own weight, if anything Jenkins had said in the hall was true.

Anderson watched the mask fall back into place and stopped his mental count. Four seconds. It took her _four seconds_ to deal what had just been said, move through the stages of shock, denial, anger, and acceptance to process what had just been said and formulate a plan of action.

He shook his head. It really was impressive.

She turned her head to face him, and her green eyes were hard. "And if I don't want this, Captain?" Her words were serious, but her tone made it clear she knew it wasn't negotiable.

He knew his duty in this, just as she knew hers. "The Alliance needs this, Shepard," he said firmly.

Nihlus nodded his agreement. "Humanity would be well-served by having you as its representative in the SPECTREs, Commander," he said.

Shepard gave an overly dramatic sigh. "Very well. What's next?"

Nihlus paced. "Eden Prime will be the first of several missions together. I need to see your skills for myself," he explained.

Anderson nodded his agreement. "You'll be in charge of the ground team. Your job here is locating and securing that beacon and getting it on board ASAP. Nihlus will accompany you to observe the mission."

Shepard raised an eyebrow.

Anderson held up his hands. "I know, it's overkill for a cargo pickup... even one as valuable as this. Consider it training for the team."

Shepard tilted her head to the side in thought, then nodded. "The marines are pretty good, sir, but I agree they could use the practice. They're suiting up now. Just give the word and we'll be ready."

"Captain!" Joker's tense voice echoed through the room. "We've got a problem. You'd better see this,"

He felt the bottom fall out of his stomach. Joker was often irreverent and ran his mouth... but he was good, and he knew not to joke about something while on duty. If he said there was a problem, there was a _problem._

"Bring it up on screen."

* * *

Shepard's mind was a whirlwind of conflicting emotions.

To be quite honest, it wasn't a state of mind she was accustomed to. While she felt no pressing need to organize the entire world, she kept her mind well-disciplined and focused. To have aspects of it running amok was distinctly a foreign experience to her, and not a pleasant one. She began, slowly and haltingly, trying to sort through what she was feeling.

She was concerned over what was happening at Eden Prime. The unknown alone was not frightening; but a confirmed hostile unknown was worrisome... especially when it broke the accepted norms for the galaxy.

She was upset with Anderson and the Systems Alliance for their betrayal. While she might not feel the same anger, she was no stranger to frustration. Getting stabbed in the metaphorical back was distinctly unpleasant, and cast a negative tint on everything she did.

She was also intrigued and, to a certain degree, _excited _about the upcoming mission. What looked initially to be a simple (and boring!) guard and escort job had turned into something _completely_ new... and even though there was no small amount of risk in it, a part of her was already looking forward to finding out what was happening.

Still. Regardless of her feelings on the matter, she had a task to complete.

She hopped down onto the cargo bay, ducking through the gap in the elevator as soon as it moved into position. The marines were waiting for her, weapons already in hand and grim expressions on their faces.

"Since rumor has proved once again to have an eezo core, I'll skip the summary," she said as she walked up to the group. "Change of plans. I want a mixed armament loadout, two heavy weapons teams, and everyone carrying a full kit of weapon mods. We're going in blind, so pack accordingly."

The heavy weapons fire team began pulling the heavy armaments – a high caliber microgrenade launcher and a high velocity machine gun – off the rack to begin loading. She nodded at them and continued.

"It's highly likely our objective has been moved, so we're leaving most of the marine complement in reserve while I take a small team down to confirm our target's location." She paused, glancing at the assembled soldiers, then nodded. "Jenkins, you're with me – I need someone that knows the lay of the land," she said, and he stepped forward.

She pursed her lips. One more would round out a scout team. As a Vanguard, she covered the front-line combat well enough, but with an unknown foe, her usual tactics might not work. She needed someone that could keep up with her if she pushed forward, with the skills to treat anyone that might have information, a level head in the face of the unknown, and a certain tactical flexibility.

There was only one member of the crew who came close to fulfilling that, and she glanced at Lieutenant Alenko.

"Kaidan, grab your guns and helmet, you're our third," she said finally. He gave a quick salute and moved briskly for his locker.

Shepard had just finished pulling her helmet on – SOP when dealing with unknown foes that could potentially be using toxins or bioweapons – when Anderson and Nihlus came down the elevator into the cargo bay.

Anderson was still in his normal uniform, but Nihlus had donned a large and bulky backpack along with a remarkably diverse arsenal of weapons.

"Nihlus," Jenkins said with surprise, "you're coming with us?"

The turian shook his head, checking the status of his rifle. "I move faster on my own," he said, before slapping the door to open the cargo bay. The roar of wind drowned out Jenkins' reply, and Nihlus executed what was – for a turian – a very elegant dive out the back of the Normandy.

Captain Anderson stepped closer to the three man team. "Nihlus will scout out ahead and feed you status reports throughout the mission," he explained for the benefit of Kaidan and Jenkins. "Your team's the muscle in this operation, Commander. Go in fast and hard, and _get that beacon._"

Kaidan scowled. "Sir, what about survivors?"

Anderson shook his head. "Helping survivors is a secondary objective. The beacon's your top priority."

Shepard understood. If the beacon had any of the schematics in it that explained how to fully control the mass relays or the citadel... far more were at risk than those on Eden Prime. "Ready and able, Sir."

He stepped back from the trio, giving them one last evaluating stare.

"The mission's yours now, Shepard," he said formally. "Good luck."

Shepard grinned and jogged for the cargo bay doors.

* * *

_Well, I was planning on covering all of Eden Prime in this chapter, but that obviously went out the window._

_Next up: We see how she fights! More importantly, her **crew** gets to see how she fights. I'm looking forward to that._


	13. Chapter 13

_A/N: So, uh, I'm not dead. This just took a little longer to write than I thought it was. It's also been written over the course of, like, a month, so apologies for any inconsistencies in style or theme._

_As an aside, I think I'm going to deviate slightly in terms of specifics. While originally I thought I'd hold very closely - line by line closely - to the original game's dialogue, that's really not workable, not without a lot of stuffing square pegs into round holes. So I'm releasing myself from my promise to keep the wording the same. I'll stay close to the original story in terms of events, and use the original dialogue where it makes sense, but I'll stop stressing myself out over small changes._

_The big advantage of this, of course, is that I don't need to have a billion saved games at different points through the ME1 campaign to play. Yay, writing from memory!_

* * *

Flight has been a unique point of fascination for humanity since the first proto-human looked skyward and felt jealous of the birds.

From ancient civilizations to modern ones, an almost universal constant in lore has been the presence of flight. The ancient Japanese wrote often on the freedom of the birds, while the biblical angels were literally winged humans in their later incarnations. Philosophers and common men alike both dreamed of taking to the skies.

It is no surprise, then, that with the discovery of element zero that humanity would leap upon the idea of trying out mass effect assisted flight for soldiers.

It was during the early combat trials that humans also (re)discovered a second, slightly less poetic term used to refer to flying targets, especially ones that were intended to be shot at:

_**Skeet.**_

There's no _cover_ in the sky.

Humanity had spent almost as long learning how to knock things _out_ of the air as they'd spent striving to put themselves up _in_ it. The element zero assisted personal jet and hover packs worked flawlessly... but enemies on the ground took immediate advantage of the completely exposed, very obvious, and incredibly clumsy targets to blast them out of the sky with extreme prejudice.

The flight programs were almost universally scrapped, since being able to fly in the rare situations where external air support was unavailable and the ground troops _wouldn't_ be blown to pieces for sticking their heads (and bodies, and legs...) out in the open wasn't worth the expense, weight, or bulk of the equipment.

While some experiments were done with reconfiguring the mass effect systems used in shield generators to provide a kind of crude "parachute" to every soldier, those systems were also quickly abandoned. The superconducting capacitors used to power a soldier's shield pack had more than enough capacity to power to negate the mass of a soldier for a short span of time, but unfortunately a five kilogram soldier falls at the same 9.8 meters per second squared as a one hundred kilogram soldier. Without some kind of parachute or opposing force directed downward, you either traveled as if in free fall, or you got blown around by every gust as your effective mass was reduced to practically nothing.

Still, this wasn't to say that element zero saw _no_ use in airborne battlefield insertions: It had been possible to drastically shrink the size of a parachute, reducing both the visible cross-section of airdropped soldiers and the bulk hauled around later. You couldn't _quite_ fit a modern parachute and mass effect field generator in your shirt pocket, but it was close, and they were common equipment in survival packs.

So when Shepard's team hit the ground on the edge of a marsh in Eden Prime, they simply reached up and grabbed the few square meters of synthetic cloth to stow it quickly in their rucksacks, rather than clamoring awkwardly out of huge swaths of heavy canvas.

* * *

Shepard didn't like fighting in marshes.

It was hard to move, solid cover was rare, stealth was impossible, and there was little in the environment that she could use to her advantage. Any fires she started could be doused with ease, anything heavy enough to inflict damage was too deeply embedded in the muck to throw, and cleaning swamp out of her armor always took hours. Still, at least it was a non-toxic swamp. If she had the poor luck to get injured, she'd need to seek medical attention in hours rather than in minutes.

She finished tucking her parachute into a pouch, then readied her shotgun. "Ready," she said over the short-range communicator.

"Ready," Alenko's comm-distorted voice echoed back. He sounded tense, but not panicked. That was good. Tension would mean he'd stay alert and focused, and in a situation where they were walking into an unknown hostile force, keeping one's head in the game was crucial.

"R-Ready," Jenkin replied, a hitch in his answer. Unsurprising, Shepard figured, given that he was watching his home burn.

Even she would be upset seeing that happen.

A quick glance around their landing zone had Shepard admiring the methodology of whoever had assaulted the planet. The attack had taken place in the late afternoon – a rarity against humans, given that most knew of their relatively weak night vision – and the unknown attackers had made full use of the psychological warfare opportunities that presented.

While night assaults _are_ convenient if an attacker wishes to utilize the element of surprise, a daytime raid is preferable if the goal is to dominate and demoralize the target. Just as poor night vision makes it difficult for humanity to react to threats in the dark, it also prevents the victim from seeing the true scope of the devastation being wrought.

For that, a daytime raid with heavy weaponry and incendiary devices is far more effective than a night assault... and that had obviously been employed here. Thick plumes of smoke drifted through the sky, dense enough to give the fading sunlight an almost infernal cast. Between the large-scale excavation that had obviously been under way long before the assault started and the ominous red glow bathing the landscape, the "garden world" more resembled a scene from Dante's inferno than the chapters of Genesis.

Whoever orchestrated this attack knew humans well. Jenkins was already breathing hard, loud enough to trigger the voice activator on his commlink, and even Kaidan was gripping his weapon more tightly than he had in all the training exercises.

Shepard flicked the red-light filter on her helmet on.

"Move out," she ordered crisply, and began stomping toward a gap in the rocks.

* * *

"Gah! What the hell are _those?!_" Kaidan's almost strangled cry was startlingly loud in her ear, and she glanced in the direction her HUD indicated he was looking. A pair of floating..._things..._ drifted lazily across the marsh's surface, completely unfazed by the destruction going on around them.

She scowled. Kaidan had the same wildlife briefing she had, which explicitly mentioned the native fauna they might pass by while on the mission. The "gasbag," as they were known locally, was a harmless animal that lifted itself by performing electrolysis of water and storing the resulting hydrogen gas in a heavily-muscled bladder. By loosening the muscles and allowing the bladder to expand slightly, it could float up slowly, and by contracting it, it could float down.

In fact, she _knew_ he'd read that part, because he was the one who had been marveling at the peculiarities of evolution that would produce such an animal. So what in the world-?

"Gasbags," Jenkins said with the almost arrogant tone of a native explaining something well-known locally to a foreigner. "Don't worry, they're harmless."

She smiled to herself inside her helmet as she glanced at the biometric feedback from her squad's armor suits. Kaidan was smarter than she'd given him credit for: In a single moment of apparent ignorance, he'd managed to put Jenkins in a position where he was in control and on familiar ground... which had, in turn, helped distract him from what her HUD told her had been a rapidly approaching panic attack.

All without the biometric readouts she, as the CO, had access to.

She quickly re-evaluated her short estimation of the Lieutenant from "bumbling skilled biotic technician" to "surprisingly insightful bumbling skilled biotic technician."

"Eugh," Kaidan said quietly as they passed by a charred skeleton on a nearby rock.

Shepard looked down at the body. "Lieutenant, you're trained in first aid. Don't most people contort when they're burned to death?"

Kaidan walked closer while Jenkins turned to cover the two. "Yes, ma'am," he said thoughtfully. "Unless..." he trailed off.

"Unless?" she prompted, and he shook himself.

"Sorry, ma'am. Unless they're burned too quickly to have time for the muscle tissue to contract with the heat." He knelt closer and pointed at the bones. "See these shiny parts here? Molten metal droplets. If I had to guess, I'd say he was standing close to an exploding mech or power plant."

Shepard nodded, then shook her head. "That doesn't make sense. If he'd been near something like that, we'd see debris, blast marks, the like."

Kaidan stood and shrugged, dusting his hands off. "Perhaps he was moved here after he died? As a warning?"

Shepard flicked a finger at the skull, half of which crumpled into flakes of carbon and ash at her touch. Kaidan sighed. "I'm stumped, ma'am. Maybe a proper forensics team can go over it when we're done here."

"Just stay sharp," she warned before heading over to pat Jenkins on the back. "You alright?" she asked, her voice gentle. It was a violation of the "handle your own shit" code many of the marines – especially the male ones – bought in to, but as a woman, she could get away with asking without hurting their egos overmuch.

Sexism was sadly alive and well in the 22nd century... although it had its upsides now and then.

Jenkins wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and nodded shakily. "Yes, ma'am," he said hoarsely and latched his helmet back into place.

She gave his shoulder a rough clap. "Good," she said, readying her shotgun and walking for the rock spires down the path.

* * *

Shepard was not a strong believer in "trusting her gut" or "getting a feel for the situation." She got far better results by analyzing what she saw on the fly, filtering things into categories, and classifying them based on their likelihood of posing a threat.

Her instructors at the ICT had scoffed at this, saying that she wasn't an AI and should stop pretending to be one. She'd politely listened to their directions to hone a "gut instinct" for situations, ignored it completely, and continued doing what had kept her alive as a small girl in a down-on-its-luck street gang for a decade and a half.

Still, when she rounded the corner leading down along a beach past several large rocks, both her "gut" and her coolly analytical mind _screamed_ ambush.

There was nowhere to dodge. To the left was a cliff leading to the ocean, to the right was solid rock.

There was no way to get back out of the depression without getting exposed to enemy fire.

There was a convenient ledge on the right that would be a perfect firing position for an enemy flanking attack.

There were a series of tall stones at the far edge of the dip that would make a perfect place to put a gunner.

If she knew people would be moving toward the settlement from the cliffs, this is _exactly _where she would put an ambush of her own... probably involving explosives and tripwires, although she doubted whatever force attacked Eden Prime had had time to do so here.

She held up her fist quickly, and her two subordinates stopped shortly behind her. A grim nod from Kaidan told her he saw the same thing she did – that this wasn't going to end well.

Unfortunately, they didn't have a choice. The only other way to the settlement was back through the swamp, and it had been impassable, or over the jagged rocks... which was suicide, as they wouldn't be able to fight back in addition to being completely exposed.

Walking into the ambush it was, then.

She made a brisk pointing motion – Jenkins taking point up to the cover at the center, Kaidan coming up on the left, while she moved up along the right side next to the cliffs.

It wasn't cruelty, but simple practicality: If they had whatever kind of weaponry had vaporized the skeleton they'd seen earlier, she didn't know if she'd be able to stop it with her barrier... and her presence was more important, to the mission, to the Alliance, and most importantly to _her_ than Jenkins' was.

In the end, however, it wasn't her orders that got Private Richard L. Jenkins killed, but his own blithering idiocy.

While she tucked in against the rocks on the right and Kaidan hunched down in the center, Jenkins threw caution into the wind and charged straight down the open center corridor.

Right into the guns of a pair of small, oddly-colored turret drones.

_Stupid,_ Shepard thought coldly as she watched the private's spine tear out the back of his armored suit. _I know it was your home planet, boy, but you prove **nothing** **to nobody **by dying pointlessly on it._

Kaidan's pistol parked twice and a pair of dents appeared in the corner of the left drone. Shepard's quick pull smashed the right one into the rocks, eliciting a small explosion and the sound of metal shrapnel ricocheting around the rocks. Four more shots later and Kaidan's drone sputtered and crashed, smoldering slightly in the sandy ground.

Kaidan leapt out from cover to check Jenkins' pulse, before shaking his head and closing the private's eyes. "Ripped right through his shield," he murmured to half to himself. "Never even had a chance." He glanced at Shepard, as if asking her what to do.

She fought the urge to roll her eyes at him. A soldier died. It happened. Especially when they decided that glorious charges were a sound battle tactic against unknown foes.

She leaned over the body and took his stash of grenades. She hadn't used any of hers, but since whatever force they were fighting appeared to be making use of drones and likely other armored units, she would want spare explosives.

She tucked the small discs onto her belt and stood, glancing at Kaidan, who was still staring at her. "Leave him," she said, gesturing at the corpse with her shotgun. "We have to finish the mission."

It was blunt, but he needed to be shaken out of his daze. More importantly, she was _right._ If there really _was_ a working prothean beacon on the planet, and some unknown hostile force got it before they could, it could lead to a war that would kill billions. The loss of a single soldier, no matter how dear, was nothing compared to that.

His eyes tightened, but he nodded. "Aye aye, ma'am," he said levelly, and Shepard began jogging up the hill without a backward glance.

* * *

The drones, as it turned out, were not terribly dangerous.

Or smart.

They hovered out of cover, intermittently pelting them with bursts of powerful but not terribly dangerous fire. They were accurate, and whatever accelerators they were using packed a wicked punch – a full burst actually tore right through her barrier and was barely stopped by her shield generator before she reinforced it – but the downtime made taking them out a simple matter of baiting their shots and hitting them during the cycle time.

It was almost like they were using old clips of ammunition, but nobody had used those for decades – not since mass accelerators had gotten cheap and powerful enough to serve as primary firearms.

They were dangerous enough, though. The corpses they'd passed on the way through the hill attested to their lethality, at least when used against standard issue weapons and armor.

Without their native guide, their going had been slow. Shepard was trained in many things, but orienteering with inaccurate topographical maps and no GPS locator while in the middle of a war zone wasn't one of them. They'd had to backtrack several times as a clear pass on their map turned out to be wrong or blown up, and the sun was nearly set by the time they finally caught sight of the main excavation site.

"About time," Kaidan said with a gasp, lowering his pistol and pulling his canteen out to take a deep drink.

Shepard nodded, but kept her shotgun trained at the path leading down toward the messy dig. They'd been passing more and more enemy equipment and technology, and even if it seemed inert, she wasn't comfortable around the strange collapsing tripods. They didn't have a clear purpose, which worried her. Nobody deployed useless equipment to battlefields. Even the religious armies of old performed their rituals to keep faith and morale strong.

A sudden burst of all-too-familiar mass accelerator fire sent them both diving for cover, Kaidan's half-empty canteen sailing through the air to land on the ground with a thud.

* * *

Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams of the Eden Prime 212th Infantry Division was _not_ having a good day.

It had started out well enough – boring, like any "safe" planetside posting – but _nobody_ could have imagined how it would have ended.

Ever since the Skyllian Blitz, groundside postings had gained a lot of prestige. Nothing like a ship posting, of course, but it was the brave actions of a few off-duty groundside soldiers that had held off the batarian forces long enough for reinforcements to arrive that let the fight end in a close victory instead of a brutal defeat. That had bumped up "dirt" postings like hers a fair bit in the eyes of the public, as it wasn't _just_ the intrepid space marines that would save humanity from the dangers of the galaxy.

As a result of the attack, they'd bumped up training quite a bit. Drills were held on a regular basis, colonists were trained, and militias were organized – even on fairly safe planets like Eden Prime. Nobody wanted to get caught with their pants down again.

Still, there was only so much one could train for. Slaver attacks, enemy raids, a restarted war with the turians, the list was huge... but assault by a force of what everyone kept saying were _geth_ was completely off the radar.

And there had been so many of them!

They'd done their best to improvise, but they'd lost most of the unit in the first wave before they'd realized that their shield units couldn't take a full burst from whatever weapons the robots were carrying. It was only worse when the hordes of drones had swept over their positions, ravaging them from the skies even as the craggy rocks and heavy concrete prefabs had shielded them from the eerily clicking and whirring ground forces.

They'd fought as best they could, of course. Bought time for the civilians to make it to shelters... at least, the few who had survived the initial assault. "Shock and awe" didn't really do the geth airdrops justice.

Her unit commander had determined – amid heavy protest – that there was no way to effectively fight back against whoever was attacking, and that their best bet was to take what few people were still alive and head for the hills to hole up until reinforcements arrived.

It sounded like a good plan at the time. They'd run into just one major hitch: The geth had simply been _everywhere._

One by one her squadmates had fallen, and the civilians with them.

When they'd walked into the ambush near research dig site, her CO had told her to take the last civilians and run. She'd gotten maybe two hundred yards before running into even _more_ of the metallic horrors... and this time, there was no way out.

The last of the civilians died on one of the tripods that the geth hauled in with them, and she knew she was soon to follow. It was only a matter of time.

She gasped for air, unpacking her barely-cooled assault rifle from its clip on her back as she listened for the telltale whirr of whatever the geth used for muscles. No matter what else happened, she thought savagely to herself, the Alliance troops that retook the planet would know she didn't die a coward.

* * *

Shepard and Kaidan stood quickly when they realized the gunfire wasn't directed at them.

Peeking over the heavy stone rock at the crest of the hill, Shepard quickly surveyed the hill that had been so recently quiet. A single battered survivor – female, by the looks of it – was tucked into a half-crouch behind a rock similar to theirs as three humanoid-looking robots moved smoothly on her position in a perfect pincer maneuver.

She ignored the startled noise Kaidan made upon seeing the machines and squinted into the sunset glare down the hill. She hadn't been expecting to see survivors still fighting – the transmission they'd received on board the Normandy wasn't exactly reassuring.

Survivors were good. They might have valuable information... and given that the armor was the same as the suits worn in the transmission they'd intercepted, she was likely a local. That was better – she needed a native guide after Jenkins died.

Contrary to popular belief, shotguns were not actually room-sweeping implements of exclusively close range destruction. You could _make_ a shotgun do that by hacking off the barrel (or, for modern mass accelerator weapons, installing a highly-illegal "Street Sweeper" mod), but most shotguns remained effective on single targets even at reasonably long ranges.

Which is why Shepard was quite surprised when the machine advancing on the woman below barely flinched as her heavily-modified shotgun spread hit it square in the upper torso. The incendiary rounds she used flickered faintly against its gray body before guttering out, leaving scorch marks but inflicting no real damage.

The thing's single eye twisted up toward her, a small outer lens spinning slightly as it focused on her.

"Take out the other two," she said quickly to Kaidan as she quickly ran through the phantom muscle tugs that would send electrical signals coursing through her nervous system in _just_ the right way to flicker through the element zero nodules in her body. "I'm capturing mine intact."

He grunted acknowledgment as her skin glowed with a pale blue light, and she grimaced as the taste of copper filled her mouth once again.

* * *

Ashley didn't know where the shotgun blast came from, and frankly, she didn't care. All that mattered to her was that it wasn't aimed at her, and _was_ aimed at the geth.

Fragments of little adages drifted through her relieved mind as she spared a moment's glance back up the hill where the blast had come from. _Any port in a storm, the enemy of my enemy is my friend..._

There were soldiers up there, at least two, a man and a woman. She couldn't spare more than a moment, however, as the frontmost geth _had_ to be right on top of-

Her thoughts were cut short as the geth rounded the side of her cover, its rifle already leveled straight at her chest.

Time slowed to a crawl, and as she began to bring her own weapon to bear, she knew she would be too late. The clarity granted by adrenaline and the bracing knowledge that one was about to die let her focus all too well on the slowly-tightening grip it had on the trigger of its weapon.

She looked into the geth's glowing eye and waited for the inevitable.

She was surprisingly disappointed.

The geth trooper jerked into the rock next to her with astonishing speed, like it had been struck by an invisible aircar. She staggered back slightly as bits of rock and geth machinery flew around in all directions, some even moving fast enough to elicit small sparks from her shield generator.

The strangely pale blue biotic glow that now wreathed the geth trooper didn't fade, even as a staccato series of shots and a pair of explosions indicated that the other two geth had been handily dispatched.

Ashley aimed her weapon at the captured geth, sighting carefully on its head.

"Hold fire!" a high, clear voice called out, and Ashley glanced up the hill.

She scowled slightly. These things had just wiped out her unit, and this woman wanted her to spare the thing?

"Hold your fire, soldier," the woman said to her again as she approached. "Alenko, open that thing up. I want to know where to shoot them."

"Aye aye, ma'am," the square-jawed man said with a nod and fabbed a quick omni-blade to cut the case of the geth open with.

She removed her finger from the trigger, but didn't lower her rifle. She had no idea who this biotic was, and even if her buddy trusted her she'd known far too many biotics that had overestimated their ability to keep things under control to be entirely trusting.

_Speaking of which... just who are these people, anyway?_

They certainly didn't _look_ like they were from Eden Prime. They weren't wearing standard issue Eden Prime infantry armor, at least. The man with his arm buried to the elbow in geth looked like a technician, judging by his skillset and heavily-laden tool belt, but the biotic amp tucked into the base of his skull marked him as a biotic, as well. A small insignia on his shoulder marked him as a lieutenant, which meant that the woman – who was obviously giving the orders – outranked him.

_Two high-ranking biotics? Without backup? What the hell?_

She shifted her gaze to the woman, and noticed quite a few details that she'd missed in her first adrenaline-tinted glance up the hill.

To start, her armor was _nothing_ like the gear normally worn by biotics. It was too well armored, for one. Most biotics preferred the lightest possible armoring they could get away with, both to cut down on the amount of weight they had to carry and to keep their range of motion free for the mnemonics they used to activate their abilities.

Instead of the woven carbon fiber and non-Newtonian fluid packs favored by most biotics, she appeared to be wearing a full suit of combat gear, complete with alloy impact plates over her organs and limbs.

Her left arm was also nonstandard. Instead of the usual plate-and-padding approach used on the rest of her gear, her entire left arm – from the shoulder down to the glove – was heavily reinforced, with actual _metal spikes_ sticking out of it. It looked like something she'd seen in an ancient gladiator video, and it would be ridiculous if she didn't wear it like she used it.

Rounding out the oddities were her outrageously heavy armament – no fewer than six grenades clipped to her belt, a high-caliber pistol, what _had_ to be a custom shotgun, and she saw the boxy butt of a heavy assault rifle and a rubber-padded sniper stock sticking over her shoulder.

Most important of all, however, was the complete absence of rank bar or identifying mark beyond a single blood-red N7 logo sewn above her left breast.

_Oh, **shit.**_

She knew of the N7s, of course. Everybody did. They were like the special forces' special forces: The absolute pinnacle of fighting talent available to the Systems Alliance, and they were _only_ sent when the situation was so far beyond "clusterfuck" that nuking the entire field of engagement was actually considered a reasonable tactical choice.

They shared no common tactic, no modus operandi, or even rank. Some were leaders, some were assassins, others still were biotics of the highest order. The only things they had in common were frightening skill... and an _absolute _dedication to the task at hand.

If an N7 was deployed to Eden Prime, it meant that shit was about to get real in the worst possible way.

She paled slightly and lowered her rifle from the geth, still gasping for breath after her fight. "Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams of the 212," she said respectfully, not turning away from the pinned robot. "Are you the one in charge here, ma'am?"

* * *

Shepard watched the winded soldier give her a quick once-over. She didn't begrudge the woman her skepticism... she'd obviously been through a lot.

"I'm Commander Shepard of the Normandy," she said, leaning back slightly and lowering her shotgun. Appearing nonthreatening while holding the struggling automaton against the boulder wasn't a trivial task, and her arm twitched slightly while she did it.

She didn't think that the soldier – Williams, she said her name was – noticed, though.

"Can you tell me what happened here?" she asked, her voice gentle. The woman had obviously escaped death by a hair's breadth. She saw no good reason to traumatize her further, at least, not unless she was the type that responded to abuse.

Luckily, that appeared not to be the case, as the pink-armored woman – _did they not believe in camouflage here? – _took a shuddering breath and wiped her brow, pulling herself together admirably quickly.

She spared a wary glance at the still-trapped machine, but faced Shepard. "We were mobilized a few days ago to guard something the scientists dug up," she said. "Didn't look like much to me, just some old electronics, but it had the eggheads _real_ excited."

She shrugged. "Whatever it was, they had the entire unit on lockdown for it, same as when we lose someone. No messages in or out without approval, and all that."

Shepard sighed. Comm blackouts had gotten _far_ better recently, as the Systems Alliance had started a (long-overdue, in Shepard's opinion) education campaign on the importance of operational security. Those improvements, however, only went as far as the _military_ training went... which handily didn't include the entire private contracting industry or the civilian attaches that were routinely tossed alongside military deployments.

"Anyway," Ashley said, pointing down the hill she'd climbed up, "a quarter kilometer down there is where they found whatever it was. It was supposed to get moved to the spaceport today, though, something about getting secure pickup."

"That was supposed to be us," Shepard said.

Ashley flinched. "You mean you're not reinforcements?"

Shepard shook her head. "No. When we landed, news of the attack was maybe halfway to the buoy at the edge of the system. They won't even know about it for a few hours, at least."

"Shit," the worn-out woman said with a sigh, her shoulders slumping. "Figures."

"Williams, we need to get to that beacon," Shepard said, an edge creeping in to her voice.

"Yeah. Yeah," Ash said, with a tired laugh. "Shit. Figures. Okay. Yeah, I can show you the way."

"Good," Shepard said simply, and nodded at the still struggling automaton. "Any ideas, Alenko?"

The technician stood up and dusted his hands off, shaking his head. "No clue, ma'am, but they're not terribly resilient. Aim for the eye or center of mass and use slugs or a close choke."

"I think they're geth," Ash said. "That's what one of the guys in my platoon said, at least."

"Geth? The geth haven't been seen outside the veil in nearly three centuries," Kaidan scoffed. "Why would they be here now? How did he even recognize it?"

Ashley cracked a smile. "Truth? The guy was a complete horndog."

Kaidan blinked in confusion while Shepard burst into laughter.

"I mean, you name it, he probably spent some _private time _in his bunk fantasizing about it. Human, alien, male, female, he didn't care. Guy was a pervert of the highest order." She gave the lieutenant a sly grin while Kaidan continued to stare at her, mouth slightly agape.

"He knows more about quarian culture than most of our _ambassadors._ So when he says 'holy shit, that's a geth' before getting sniped, I'm inclined to believe him," she finished with a slightly defiant glare.

Shepard shook her head, laughter trailing off. "Okay, so they're geth. Did he have any idea why they were here?"

"No, ma'am," Ashley replied. "Like I said, he got shot right afterward."

"Right." She glanced at her lieutenant. "Finish that thing off, Lieutenant, and let's get going. I don't want to fight in the dark."

"Uh, yes, ma'am."

"Williams?"

"Ma'am?"

"Take us to the dig site."

"Ma'am."

* * *

Several more easily dispatched geth later, and the trio was standing at the edge of an obviously rushed excavation in the open ground of Eden Prime.

"This is the dig site, ma'am. They must have moved the beacon this morning," Williams said.

"Figures," Shepard said absently, glancing around the strange vertical decorations.

"How far to the spaceport from here? Our topo maps are a little out of date," Kaidan said.

Ashley pursed her lips, thinking back to the frantic escape she'd made only hours earlier. "I don't know. Maybe four or five klicks, but there's a tram over by the loading bay only a klick or so from here. It was shut down when we ran, but..."

"Is the tram far out of the normal road to the port?" Shepard called from a nearby wall.

"It's not exactly on the way, but it's not that far beyond it," Ashley said with a shrug.

"Then we head for the tram," Shepard said. "Worst case, we can run the tracks faster than we can the road. Which way?"

Ashley gestured up an earthen ramp. "Up there, past the dig offices."

Shepard's radio crackled to life, carrying a series of unintelligible syllables in a strange clipped tone. Alenko blinked in confusion, while Shepard cocked her head to trigger her implanted throat microphone, speaking slowly and clearly.

"Repeat that, Nihlus, our translator can't make that out through the interference."

"-said I, spaceport of interesting," Nihlus' metallice voice said in her ears after a moment.

Shepard glanced at the pair. "Either of you catch that?"

Kaidan lifted his omni tool to his mouth. "Copy that, Nihlus. Watch yourself, we think there are geth here."

"That."

Shepard raised an eyebrow at Kaidan, who shrugged. "He said he saw something interesting up by the spaceport tram and that he was going to check it out."

Shepard nodded. "Okay." _Note to self,_ Shepard thought,_ update translator._

Ashley glanced at the two of them. "That sounded turian," she said suspiciously.

"It was," Shepard said, hefting her shotgun to her shoulder. "We're working with a turian SPECTRE named Nihlus."

Williams shifted slightly, then nodded. "Understood, ma'am."

Shepard glanced up the dirt road. It seemed clear enough.

"Move up."

* * *

Shepard had seen the strange tripods several times along the long path to the dig site, and had been given a front row seat in seeing how they were used to impale the corpses – or prisoners – taken by the geth.

She hadn't really given them a second thought, writing them off as a simple intimidation technique. An effective one, but easily filed away in a category and dismissed.

She wouldn't make that mistake again.

As the trio crested the small road, the spikes with corpses suddenly retracted with a grinding metallic noise, pulling out of the impaled corpses fast enough to cause them to bounce slightly upon hitting the top of the tripod.

"Jesus-" Ashley shouted, leveling her rifle at the structures.

Shepard held up a hand, moving forward slowly with her gun drawn and barrier active. She wouldn't put it past the geth to booby trap the corpses somehow, getting a kind of final piece of utility from the enemy's fallen. If they'd taken the time to study humans at all before assaulting, they'd know that it would be typical to collect the dead. Planting explosive charges in the corpses of the fallen, especially the desecrated fallen, would be an easy way to inflict more morale damage and cause casualties among the support crew. She was right, it turned out, but not in the way she expected.

The corpses here appeared... _desiccated_ was the best word she could come up with. They had been drained dry, sucked of all moisture with various pieces of wiring embedded in their skin.

She scowled, pushing more power to her barrier and watching as the typical blue paled slightly to a turquoise as the gravitational field intensified.

It was a move that saved her life.

She was just reaching out to touch the skin of the corpse when it jerked to life, twisting around on the spire in an alarmingly close facsimile of agony while blue light began coursing through the twisting electronics sewn into its skin.

The light grew quickly to a searing brightness before erupting in a shower of arcing lightning that skittered up and over the dense air held in place by her barrier, channeling what would have been a lethal shock into a hair-straightening near brush with electrocution.

"Commander-!" Kaidan's voice called out, followed almost immediately by the staccato bursts from Ashley's assault rifle. The creature... the _husk_... that was crawling off the tripod in the back twisted and jerked, its form riddled with countless drops of high-velocity molten metal.

Shepard wasted no time, bringing her shotgun up one-handed and squeezing off two rounds into the creature in front of her. The high powered armor-piercing slugs blew clean holes right through the thing, which promptly ignored them as it tried to slam into her through her barrier.

She gritted her teeth, ignoring the overwhelming taste of copper and smell of ozone as she sent the thing flying head over heels into the dirt berm behind the machine that had created it.

It was very quickly followed by a biotically-propelled incendiary grenade.

The wave of heat crashed over her, and she felt its intensity even through the sealed environment suit. The husks, sadly bereft of protective armor and a heavy biotic barrier, were far less comfortable. Their anguished cries – Shepard tried not to think of them as such, but they were _very_ convincing – trailed off quickly into the sickly sweet smell of burning human flesh.

The trio lowered their guns, glancing at each other and the _zombies_ that had just attacked them in mute horror.

"Make sure they're dead," Shepard said coldly after a moment's pause. She walked over to the nearest husk. Five quick shotgun blasts separated its limbs and head from the torso.

"I won't even pretend to know what those were, or how to stop them," she said to the still-stunned pair. "Take their heads off, take their limbs off, and toss all the bits in different directions."

Suiting actions to works, she jammed her fingers in the empty eye sockets of one of the skulls and gave it an underhanded roll down the hill into the excavation pit.

Kaidan looked green.

"I don't have time to cut one open and see what makes it tick," she snapped, aggravated by the almost painful pulse of adrenaline in her veins. "I don't know what they take to kill, but even if they can still function when dismembered I don't think hands finger-crawling on the ground will be able to threaten us. Move."

Ashley stifled a giggle.

"Yeah, funny image. Now help me with those," she said, gesturing at the remaining bodies, both on and off the tripod structures.

"Uh, ma'am," Ashley said nervously. "Some of those aren't... I mean... they're still..."

"Chief, we have _no idea_ how this stuff works and _no idea_ whether we're going to be flanked by more geth as we move forward. I don't know about you, but I _do not want_ more zombies crawling up my six."

"I guess not, ma'am," she said.

"Good. Now both of you... get to work," she ordered, and tossed another arm away into the hill.

* * *

"I think... I think that's the last of them, Commander," Kaidan said as he gave a biotic shove to the last torso, sending it flailing through the air into the bush.

Shepard sighed, wishing she could rub her forehead. "Good. Let's clear these habitats before we move on – I thought I saw something moving in them when we were cleaning up."

Ashley nodded. "Some of the science team might have hidden in here. Most of the doors are still closed..."

"Right. Kaidan? I'll cover you. Get that lock open." Shepard moved to Kaidan's left, fanning the approach with her shotgun while Ashley comfortably settled in on the right side.

"Aye aye, ma'am," Kaidan acknowledged, kneeling down and popping the cover off of the door control.

The door slid open moments later, and Kaidan stepped back. Shepard threw up another barrier and stepped inside, her shotgun held ready.

"Oh, thank the maker," a relieved voice said from inside. "Humans."

Shepard lowered her gun.

A nervous-looking man in a lab coat crawled out from underneath a desk. "Are they gone? Is it safe?" he said in a voice edged with panic, wringing his hands.

_Great. Panicking civilians. Just what I needed._

"It's okay," she soothed, clipping her shotgun to the holster above her butt. "They're gone. Nobody's gonna hurt you."

"When that big ship landed... I thought it was all over," the woman said. "The soldiers tried to get us to the shelters, but... I don't think many of them made it."

"Some did," Ashley said fiercely. "I know it."

Shepard held up a hand, forestalling further comment. "We're looking for the beacon you dug up," she said. "Do you know where it was taken?"

The woman nodded. "Yes. It was moved to the spaceport via the tram this morning."

Shepard smiled, her shoulders dipping slightly. "First piece of good news all day," she said. "We're heading for the spaceport. Stay here where it's safe."

"Nowhere is safe!" the man blurted, his eyes wild. "the age of humanity is ending! Soon, only ruin and corpses will remain!"

She glanced at the lead researcher, who was shaking her head behind him. "What's wrong with your assistant?"

The woman gave a long-suffering sigh. "Manuel has a brilliant mind, but, well... genius and madness are two sides of the same coin, after all." She glanced at the twitching man, a concerned expression ghosting her face, before looking back at the commander. "I've given him an extra dose of his meds. They should kick in soon."

Shepard nodded, understanding, and stepped forward toward the man, reaching out her left hand to pat him on the shoulder.

Then there was a blue flash, a loud crack, and the assistant – Manuel – suddenly lay in a crumpled heap on the ground against the wall.

For a moment, nobody moved while Shepard shook out her right hand.

"What the hell?!" the woman exclaimed, kneeling to check the man's pulse. "You can't just go whacking people upside the head!"

Kaidan gave a slight cough. "That... might have been a little extreme, Commander," he said awkwardly.

She rolled her eyes. "Give him a hypo of painkillers, Alenko. As for you..." she glared at the woman. "You know it was only a matter of time before he did something crazy... and dangerous."

She met the N7's gaze for a moment, before sitting in defeat. "I suppose you're right. By the time he wakes up, his meds will have kicked in."

"You can give him an apology from me when he wakes, if you like," Shepard said. "But we have to go." She turned back to face Ashley. "Williams, take us to the spaceport."

Ashley wiped the smirk from her mouth and saluted smartly. "Aye aye, ma'am."

* * *

"Ma'am? Mind if I ask you a question?" Ashley asked as they were moving slowly toward the tram station.

"You just did, Chief," Shepard replied.

"Ha, ha, ma'am. Really."

Shepard chuckled. "Go ahead, Williams."

"How'd you do that?" she asked.

"Do what?"

"The researcher. Back in the habitat. I know when you punch someone out in the vids, they go flying like that, but... no offense intended, ma'am, but even with all that armor you can't weight more than ninety kilos. He looked to be at least a hundred."

Shepard laughed, vaulting over a roadblock. "Actually, Chief, when I hit him, I massed just under five hundred."

Ashley blinked. "What?"

"Williams, I'm a biotic," Shepard explained. "It's not difficult to change my own mass. I just made my fist much, much heavier right before it hit him."

Alenko blinked. "That's... pretty unusual, Commander, if you don't mind my saying so. Most biotics can't ramp a field up that quickly."

She shrugged. "I have a few advantages, but it's not impossible for the general public, either. I imagine that the next generation of implants will make it possible for pretty much everyone. The L3s already ramp up faster than the L2s, even if the L2s do spike higher."

"Advantages?" Alenko scowled. "What kind of-"

"Sh," Shepard said, stopping suddenly and holding up a fist. "Did you hear that?"

"I heard it," Ashley said. "Single shot, probably a pistol. From the tram."

"Didn't sound like a geth weapon," Shepard said.

"No, it didn't," Ashley confirmed. "There must still be survivors down there!"

Shepard frowned. "Maybe," she said. "Or maybe not. Let's go look."

* * *

"I still think you should have let me grill his ass," Ashley growled as they tossed the last limp geth body off the tram.

"Then it's a good thing I'm in charge," Shepard said mildly.

"He screwed us over! We could have _used_ those-" Ashley snarled.

"Williams." Shepard's voice was empty, and Ashley gulped.

"I'm sorry, ma'am," she said quickly

Shepard nodded, pushing the last broken synthetic carcass off the tram. "There was also a _reason_ I didn't 'grill his ass,' as you put it."

"Ma'am?" Williams looked up at her, confused.

"If you go after him, make him think we're cracking down, he'll wipe his tracks. Claim the records were damaged in the attack, or something."

"Bullshit," Ashley scoffed.

"Maybe. But he'd get away with it. If he thinks we're too busy to investigate because of the attack, he probably won't. Normally, he'd be right."

"Normally?" Ashley asked, and Shepard nodded as she walked to the tram control.

"_Somebody_ leaked the presence of the beacon here," she said. "It's why we were already on our way when the attack hit. Now which is more likely? That a soldier worked extra-hard to violate training and orders to break blackout, that a scientist with full understanding of the impact of the discovery here broke blackout, or that some bored civilian contractor in military supply told a story about some crazy thing they dug up to his drinking buddies back at the depot?"

She threw the lever on the tram, which jerked forward with an angry hum.

"No, Williams," she said, "I think I know _exactly_ who broke blackout here... and if he thinks he got away with it, the investigation won't take long. Not long at all."

She stowed her shotgun, lifting her rifle to a resting position against one of the seats to cover the front of the train. "If you're the vengeful type, Williams, I'll remind you that willfully breaking operational security in such a way as to cause casualties counts as _treason._"

"So by all means, go back and yell at him if you'd like. Put the fear of God into him, if you believe in that," she said dismissively, ignoring Ashley's awkward wince. "If vengeance is what you want, I think you'd be better off waiting until it reaches the traditional temperature for serving."

"Ma'am?" Ashley said in confusion, settling down on the tram to cover the opposite side from Shepard.

"Cold, Williams. Vengeance – like revenge – is a dish best served cold."

Ashley blinked, then nodded, an almost predatory smile ghosting her lips. "Aye aye, ma'am."

* * *

Kaidan Alenko was many things.

He was a technician, skilled in the use and even development of many combat cyber warfare suites. He had a head for code, and was good at getting everything he could out of his short range wireless broadcast units.

He was a biotic, one of the Alliance's best. He was an L2, with all the advantages and disadvantages that carried with it, and combined with his technical skills he considered two of the four fundamental forces of the universe subject to his beck and call.

He was a soldier, again, one of the Alliance's best. While he wasn't a master of arms like some soldiers were, he knew how to use nearly everything in the Alliance's infantry arsenal, and he was a fair shot.

He was a medic, capable of actually helping people heal instead of just slapping on medi-gel to keep them stable like most soldiers. While he wasn't a true doctor, he would pit his emergency response medical skills against those of any trained civilian responder any day.

With all the talents he had in his possession, one thing he was decidedly _not_ used to was being outclassed to the point of feeling like a FNG.

Shepard managed to do it to him, though.

She moved through the battlefield with an unsettling and, quite frankly, unearthly grace. It wasn't that she moved particularly quickly, although she was reasonably nimble despite the armor she was wearing.

No, it was the pacing. Most ground commanders would move up, stop, secure a position, determine an enemy's likely points of counterattack, order covering fire, and move forward when an opportunity presented itself.

Either Shepard didn't believe in that kind of warfare... or she went through the entire process faster than anyone had a right to. He'd initially been terrified that she was going to get them all killed by an enemy they'd missed, but despite the breakneck pace she set through the spaceport he never saw a single active geth after she passed by a point... only their broken and literally shattered remains.

He'd taken care of the explosives they'd left behind, of course. The bombs were – despite being obviously geth technology – quite simple in their design, and it wasn't difficult to snip the appropriate wires (or, more accurately, smash the right circuit board with the butt of his rifle) before sprinting to catch up with the carnage that his commander was wreaking.

Even with that task assigned to him, however, he still felt like a little kid being humored by an adult on "take your child to work" day. He had no doubt that, despite whatever lack of technical knowledge Shepard might have, she'd have figured out a solution in no more time than it took her to fling the geth heavy troopers into the electrified tram line.

_Come on, Kaidan. You're an accomplished soldier, not some green kid straight out of boot camp. You're important to the mission, and Shepard **would** be inconvenienced if you weren't here._

He snorted to himself. Even in his self-reassurances, he couldn't convince himself that he was doing anything more than alleviating a minor inconvenience for the Commander.

_Well. At least I'm not slowing her down, _he thought morosely as he smashed his pistol butt through the last bomb's control circuitry with a little more viciousness than was really necessary.

* * *

With Kaidan covering the last bomb, Shepard allowed herself to bleed down the leftover energies she had wrapped herself in during her push through the spaceport. It had been a fun exercise, she thought, a kind of stretch that an athlete might perform before a heavy workout.

Not that there were many athletes who measured their success in number of ancient enigmatic automata destroyed per unit time, but the metaphor remained.

Smiling slightly at the elegance of the destruction she had just wrought, she turned to her two squadmates as they caught up.

Kaidan looked... wary. She smiled to herself. _Trust a biotic to recognize it_, she thought to herself. The power she'd fielded while clearing the spaceport tram dock wasn't particularly great for her, but it was far above and beyond what most biotics could sustain. It was also, she admitted to herself, unnecessary given the scope of the foe they had been fighting. She could justify it with all kinds of "unknown enemies warrant as strong a reaction as possible" line, but the honest truth of it was that she could and should have been more conservative in her assault. It was so _nice_ to get out and play, though.

Ashley's expression was far easier to decipher: She was simply awestruck.

_Poor woman's been stuck dirtside too long, _Shepard thought. She was good, yes, but that wasn't exactly a difficult advance, even for a fresh team. The geth – if that's what they really were – weren't exactly the terrifying opponents that she'd expected from the stories the quarians told.

"Bombs are defused, ma'am," Kaidan said.

She nodded. "Good. There are more of those... what did you call them, Williams? Husks? Down in the spaceport loading bay."

Both of them winced. They didn't like fighting the freakish zombie-like creatures, not least because they were the desecrated corpses of their former allies.

"I know," she said sympathetically, and pointed down to the dock. "At least they'll have to come up that ramp to get to us. We'll toss a grenade to get their attention and gun them down as they move up."

Ashley spat on the ground. "Like fish in a barrel," she said, checking the ammo block on her rifle. Kaidan nodded in agreement, pulling his own mostly unused rifle out.

"Right," Shepard said, lifting one of her grenades up and activating it with a click. "Frag out!" she shouted, hurling the beeping disc down into the middle of a group of the blue-laced abominations.

Ashley barely remembered to close her mouth before reporting to the Commander. She knew her awe was showing, but she didn't care.

_No wonder the N7 teams are feared. Jesus Christ. _She didn't swear much, but it was warranted here. _It's like... like watching a cat play with its food._

Except that the cat was armed with enough weaponry and power to level a small battalion, and the food consisted of some of the most feared synthetic enemies ever to exist in the galaxy.

She shook her head to clear it as Shepard tossed a small explosive discus expertly in the center of a group of husks on the dock.

"That got their attention," Shepard said with a grin as she knelt down between her and Kaidan, drawing her pistol. Her rifle she set down on the decking in front of her in easy reach.

She would normally question anyone who drew a pistol when faced with a charging line of what were , in her book, zombies, but if the last hour of fighting taught her anything it was that the Commander _never_ did anything without a reason.

So she sighted down her well-tended rifle's sights and began putting an intermittent stream of well-aimed shots into the torsos of the husks. They didn't drop like a normal unarmored civilian would – although the small flashes when her rounds connected suggested that in addition to whatever those tripods did, it also gave them a shield generator – but they certainly didn't like it, either.

They kept coming, though.

Shepard had held her fire, waiting for the foremost husk to close to the last leg of the ramp before squeezing off a single round from her pistol.

* * *

Ashley had expected a high-caliber, possibly antipersonnel round of some kind. The tumultuous explosion that tore the husk's head clean off and sent the three behind it flying head over heels back down the ramp was decidedly _not_ typical of a handgun.

Much to her credit, she thought, she managed to keep firing without more than a momentary pause. It was a near thing, though, especially as the shockwave of whatever unholy explosive round she was using rolled over them.

"Aghk-!" Kaidan sputtered, nearly dropping his weapon. "What the hell, Shepard?" he nearly shouted.

She flashed him a quick grin before sighting back down at the remaining husks. "High-explosive contact explosive," she said over their moans of the husks and the ringing in all of their ears. "Overloads the suspension coils almost instantly, but if you need more than one shot..."

Three more explosions cleared the lower leg of the ramp, sending a small avalanche of husks rolling back down toward the spaceport proper.

Ashley readjusted her aim at the pile of tangled limbs and bodies, firing more rapidly now that nearly every round was guaranteed to be a target. Shepard tried as well, but was rewarded with a quiet beeping and flashing red light on the butt of her pistol.

"Case in point," she said, holstering her pistol and lifting her rifle from the ground in front of her.

Ash snorted as the heavy thump of the Commander's rifle joined the higher-pitched crack of hers and Kaidan's.

* * *

"I guess that's where the big ship landed," Kaidan said as Ashley wrinkled her nose at the acrid smoke drifting from the literally _glowing_ crater where most of the spaceport used to be.

"Probably," Shepard said. "It gives me an idea, though."

Kaidan raised an eyebrow at Shepard as the telltale glow of a mass effect field coalesced around her arms once again. Behind her, the bullet-ravaged corpses of the husks slid along the battered spaceport dock to tumble into the red-hot pile of rubble. "There," she said, brushing her hands off.

Ashley and Kaidan stared at her.

Shepard rolled her eyes. "Until someone figures out exactly what those are and how they're made, I'm not trusting them to stay dead. Unless you feel inclined to take them apart by hand..." she trailed off, and the pair shook their heads quickly. "I didn't think so. Now, this beacon..."

She glanced at the ominously humming relic sitting untouched in the center of a small platform, then shrugged and flicked on her radio. "Normandy, this is shore party. We've secured the beacon and need immediate extraction."

Joker's voice crackled back. "Roger that, shore party. ETA about five minutes. Anything else?"

Shepard glanced around. "Nihlus and Jenkins are KIA. We encountered hostile synthetics, tentatively identified as geth by the planetary defense forces. Said synthetics appear to have the ability to mechanize and re-animate our dead as shock troopers. Recommend full armor and environment seals for any ground troops."

She paused for a moment, letting that sink in.

"Uh... roger that, shore party..." Joker's skeptical voice echoed over the radio. "I don't suppose you saw the Easter bunny, too?"

"Funny," she snapped. "Make sure that nobody touches anything. We defused four nuclear devices alread-"

She was stumbled by a sudden pulse of vertigo, the same instability she felt whenever a starship's mass effect drive powered up to full strength.

Spinning in an instant, she turned to the beacon, which was glowing with an eerie green glow as Kaidan was pulled inexorably toward it by a great invisible hand.

_So it's not dead. No wonder the scientists were excited,_ she thought calmly as electrical charges flickered through her own element zero tainted nervous system, forming the subtle dark energy fields that twisted gravity to her will.

_Let's see what you've got._

The answer, as turned out, was "quite a lot."

Getting a "taste" for the field being used to carry Kaidan toward the beacon was trivial – it wasn't particularly strong. She easily overwhelmed it, nullifying it in a loud explosion and yanking Kaidan back from the prothean relic.

Shepard smiled as the lieutenant sailed through the air, his limbs flailing, to crash unceremoniously into the deck. Her smile vanished, however, as she felt the same phantom grip she'd pried Kaidan from reach for her... and with a far stronger pull than she'd just fought off.

She dimly heard Ashley's shout as she was tugged toward the beacon, gritting her teeth as adrenaline flooded her body with its time-dilating illusion.

Her first attempt to nullify the field by generating an oppositely-charged effect ended with a deafening detonation that shook the entire deck and sent the nearby steel shipping crates flying like toy blocks.

_Whoa_, she thought somewhat woozily as the echoes in her head subsided. _Bad plan_.

As the relic dragged her closer and upright, she focused on trying to disable the device. Valuable ancient relic or no, her life was in danger, and that took priority.

Unfortunately for her, it, too, was guarded... and a slowly growing noise in her head wasn't helping her focus, either.

Her first strike – a thin series of rapidly shifting mass effect fields known as a _warp_ – tore a great furrow in the reinforced concrete decking, but diminished in strength as it neared the beacon, to the point of barely shaking it when it finally contacted. Unperturbed, Shepard bit her tongue and tried again.

If only that stupid _buzzing _would stop-

Her train of thought was derailed by a hallucination so vivid, it blotted out the world entirely. She was standing on a world, an alien weapon in her hands, firing at vaguely insectoid creatures with similar markings as the husks they'd fought earlier. The smell of smoke was strong in her nose, and her three-fingered hand squeezed the trigger rapidly.

_Wait. Three-fingered?_

The image vanished, and she twitched in the beacon's iron grasp. She threw another warp at the beacon, but only succeeded in blowing the damaged railing next to the crater halfway across the crater.

_No!_

An alien voice spoke in her ears, in words and syllables she had never heard and didn't have the first clue how to decipher. Six-sided flakes of green fluttered before her eyes, and the screaming sound of the condemned pounded in her head as the image of machines _burrowing_ into flesh floated across her sight.

Desperation lent her an unnatural strength, and she fought on even while the world faded slowly into madness.

* * *

"Shepard!" Kaidan shouted as soon as he picked himself up from the ground. He'd been careless. The thing had been _glowing, _for crying out loud, and like an idiot he'd walked right at it without the first clue what it really was.

He started forward, desperate to help his commander before Ashley's strong arm grabbed him and held him back. "No!" she snapped, "leave her! It's too late," she said angrily. He ignored her, reaching out again, this time with his not insignificant biotic power to pluck Shepard from the thing's grasp just as she had done for him.

His "pull," a small burst of energy that upon impact would coalesce into a short-lived and powerful attractive field, splattered against an invisible barrier harmlessly.

"Get _back, _lieutenant," Ashley said, dragging him for the ramp as the first of Shepard's heavy salvos struck.

_Holy..._

He didn't know if Shepard was aware of what was going on or simply lashing out, but in either case, the results were _devastating._ Thousand-pound steel shipping crates were shredded, torn apart like wet tissue paper, the pieces tossed aside to crash into the concrete of the decking. The deck itself warped and buckled, rippling unnaturally before crumbling into pieces around her.

A hideous screeching and grinding noise erupted from the right side of the spaceport as one of the damaged radio towers collapsed on them, resulting in a shower of sparks and a deafening crash as it bounced off the same barrier that had deflected his biotic assault.

_And all that chaos is only the **splash **from whatever she's trying to use on that beacon, _he thought to himself with a shiver, as he unconsciously began scooting backwards with Ashley.

Strong as she was, though, he didn't think she was winning. She was managing to thoroughly destroy what was left of the spaceport, but the beacon itself looked mostly unaffected.

At least until it exploded, flinging the Commander's limp body through the air onto the ramp behind them with a sickening thud.

* * *

_So! Next: The aftermath, more aftermath, and then the citadel! It should be a wild ride._


	14. Chapter 14

_A/N: So... had a somewhat involuntary hard drive reformat recently. As a result, writing has been somewhat challenging of late, and I had to redo this chapter pretty much from scratch... as well as many of my more recent notes._

_Needless to say, this is somewhat frustrating. I didn't have a chance to review this chapter, either, so you're getting the rough draft. I just didn't want to wait any longer to post something. Still, we're driving onward. L's – or Elle's – journey is by no means over, just slightly slower than originally intended._

_Lastly, there are a few minor deviations from canon in this chapter. However, all of them are are based on what I, as a player, noticed in the vision from the beacon on Eden Prime. The Shepard from this tale is smarter and faster on the pickup than the Shepard from the normal game._

* * *

"Captain, I just lost contact with the ground team," Joker said worriedly over his shoulder as he flew the Normandy to the ruined spaceport. "Suit feed, communications, helmet cam, everything."

Anderson leaned forward, staring into the darkening skies with furrowed brows."What's our ETA?" he asked.

"Thirty seconds, a minute maybe," Joker guessed, not bothering to check his instruments.

"Step on it," Anderson ordered. "Drop stealth."

"Aye aye, sir," Joker acknowledged, and the Normandy's drive pitched up an octave as the sleek vessel surged forward toward the spaceport.

"We should be seeing the spaceport soo- WHOA!" he exclaimed, his eyes fixed on the visual feed from the Normandy's nose camera. The spaceport was in ruins, of course, but the imagery they'd taken from orbit had already confirmed that. That wasn't the alarming part.

The alarming part was the brilliant blue flashes erupting from the coordinates for the beacon that Shepard's team had radioed in just moments before.

Anderson reached over Joker's head and grabbed the shipwide communicator. "All marine teams, prepare for immediate deployment," he snapped over the intercom, his eyes not leaving the surges of blue light from the spaceport. "Get that dock secured."

Hanging up the communicator, he turned to Joker. "Get us down, _now_," he ordered. Joker didn't respond, all his focus set on settling down the building-sized frigate down without crushing anything... or anyone.

* * *

The images didn't stop when Shepard finally fell unconscious.

Instead, like many things in dreams, the images and experiences that had been forcefully seared into her mind took on a life of their own. Unrestricted by the limits of mere reality, the increasingly distorted images and sensations played through her mind on fast forward repeat: Endlessly looping through her head as her subconscious desperately tried to assimilate thoughts and memories that were never designed for human physiology.

Shepard didn't, as a general rule, remember her dreams. They lacked a solid grounding in the real world, and her mind simply didn't form enough connections to allow her to remember them. She had no doubt that the experiences were there, etched away somehow in a dark recess of her mind, but she lacked a way to associate with something so far removed from the hard and rational world she lived in. As a result, any memories she had of her nighttime meanders were locked away, unreachable with the return of wakefulness.

Not this time, however. Shepard knew, in the distant and fuzzy way that one did when one was dreaming, that she would remember these experiences for the rest of her life. They stood out _because_ they were different. There was nothing in her life she could relate to in the sensations imparted by the prothean beacon. The pure _alien_ nature of it all led her mind to latch on to the foreign images, frantically twisting them in a desperate attempt to make sense of memories and feelings that she had never felt and would never feel.

It was exhausting.

Sometimes she would be whatever alien creature had left the recording in the beacon. Other times she was herself... but the fragile porjection of her true self in her subconscious would break apart the instant she stepped forward on a three-toed, reverse-jointed foot.

She was drowning in the impossibility of it all, unable to accept it, unable to escape it, and unable to change it, and something deep inside her screamed in agony as the memories tore through her head once again.

* * *

In the medical bay, Karin Chakwas' patient whimpered slightly in her sleep as the EEG attached to her skull beeped a quiet alert.

She frowned, tapping the instrument's calibration before sighing softly.

"How is she, Karin?"

She glanced up from the monitor to see an utterly exhausted Captain Anderson standing against the medical bay doorframe, his uniform covered with dirt and grime.

"It's hard to say," she said quietly. "She has a mild concussion from the landing, even with the helmet, but otherwise she seems unharmed."

Anderson nodded slowly. "Any idea when she'll wake up?"

She shook her head. "It's only been a few hours, David. Give her time. Frankly, even if she _hadn't _been exposed to unknown alien technology, I wouldn't expect her to be awake for at least half a day. The biotics she was using..." she trailed off, shaking her head once again. "They're something else," she said at last.

"Yeah," he said guardedly, "they are. I take it you've seen her full records?"

"I have, and I wish you'd have shown me earlier," she said, her tone scolding.

He held up his hands. "I'm sorry. I would have if I could. It's just..." he shrugged helplessly. "Politics."

She sighed. "I can't do my job properly if _these,_" she said, gesturing angrily at the faked medical records on her desk, "are what they give me. Politics won't matter if she _dies_ because I don't know something about her physiology, David!"

Anderson winced.

She took a deep breath. "Still... I can understand why some might think it a good plan. Just _don't do it again,_ you hear me?"

"I won't."

The two stood in comfortable silence for a few moments.

"What about the others?" he asked finally.

"Well, Alenko was working up a headache with the guilt he was wallowing in, so I sent him out to oversee the marines and treat any survivors they found," she said, and Anderson nodded. "He really should be resting, but I don't think that boy knows how to relax."

"I just saw him. He'll manage."

"Jenkins..." she began sadly. "Standard procedure for soldiers KIA by an unknown enemy is to preserve the body for a full autopsy, so he's in the freezer."

"He deserves better," Anderson rumbled.

"Yes. Yes, he does," she agreed.

They were silent for a few longer, less comfortable moments.

Finally, Chakwas broke it as she picked up a slate on her desk. "The other one, Williams – she wanted to go out even more than Alenko did. I put my foot down for her, though."

"She has a good heart," Anderson said. "where is she now?"

"Sleeping, if she has any sense," Chakwas said bluntly. "What do you need with her?"

"I'm considering offering her a slot on the Normandy," he said.

She raised an eyebrow at him. "Why?"

"Because she's good," he said, swiping his hand through the air in a cutting motion. "Because I've been there and the thing she needs least right now is to get bumped to another groundside posting as 'rest' with nothing to do but stew in it all. Because she's been passed over too many times for something that wasn't her fault."

"Not everyone is like you, Captain," Chakwas reminded him with a smile. "Still, I do see a few... similarities," she admitted. "Think the Commander will go for her?"

He shrugged. "I gave up trying to predict what Shepard would do about five minutes after I first met her," he said, and Chakwas laughed. "I just don't get her, Karin."

"I'm not sure anybody does." she said.

"You're probably right," Anderson said with a sigh. "I should get back to it," he said, pushing himself off the hatch frame. "I'll be helping sweep the city. Comm me if anything changes," he ordered before walking out.

Chakwas brushed a lock of gray hair out of her eyes and nodded to the empty room before turning back to the monitors.

* * *

Shepard woke slowly, the twisted and distorted images and sounds conjured by her subconscious fading slowly beneath the relentless march of the memories of her conscious mind. It was not, she reflected as her head throbbed, the most pleasant awakenings she had ever experienced.

She had no doubt that there would repercussions for what had happened. Nihlus dead, although thankfully not slain by any weapon carried by her, her team, or the planetary defense forces. The beacon they were sent to retrieve destroyed... and by her, to boot. The human colony of Eden Prime completely wrecked.

It really hadn't been a good day.

She resisted the urge to sigh, and began running through the ritual post-injury test that all soldiers did after waking from injury. The original test had simply been fingers and toes, but the importance of lost limbs had lessened with the advent of modern medical technology. Brain damage, on the other hand, was much harder to treat. The test had thus evolved, moving away from a simple physical self-check to a more extensive first pass test for brain function.

She wiggled each finger and toe, and all her fingers and toes bent obediently at her command. She took a deep breath, and felt both lungs fill completely. She counted to ten in her head, visualized the numbers, recited a memorized poem, spelled out the words, sniffed the air, and finally opened her eyes.

Stars swum in front of her eyes as she reflexively lifted a hand to her temples, wincing at the intensity of the dim med bay lamps while her stomach rebelled. _Photosensitivity. Visual artifacts. Nausea. _She sighed. _A migraine. Wonderful._

She knew she was lucky, of course. By all rights, she should have died on the dock, or had her mind scrambled so badly that she would be on the short list for organ donation. Getting away from a brush with alien technology that seemed designed to directly interface with one's _brain_ with nothing more than a migraine and horrible memories was fortunate, indeed... even if she didn't feel like it at the moment.

Wait. Memories.

She scowled and tensed, ignoring the surge of pain the slight movement brought.

_The beacons were left behind by the protheans._

_The protheans vanished mysteriously fifty thousand years ago._

_The protheans left almost no intact traces of their civilization beyond the indestructible mass relays and equipment buried deep in bunkers or on remote worlds._

_A working piece of prothean communication technology carries horrifying images of a fight against giant... well, squid-like vessels assisted by what appear to be reanimated corpses._

_We saw a giant squid-like vessel leaving the spaceport... and Williams' husks are..._

She sat up so quickly that she managed to get nearly halfway out of the bed before her inner ear informed her that her stomach would be emptying itself _immediately,_ thank you very much.

* * *

Chakwas had been a doctor long enough recognize that the Commander was waking up before Shepard did. Even without the electroencephalogram, she had learned over the years to recognize the subtle shifts in breathing that heralded a return to consciousness. In soldiers, it was even easier – the ritual self-examination (or "POST" as the engineers liked to call it) never failed to rustle the sheets of the beds.

With a scanner hooked directly up to her brain, of course, Chakwas had an even more pronounced advantage. When Shepard's brain waves had finally stabilized into something resembling normal human sleep, she'd noted down the time. When they began their shift into REM sleep, she knew that – barring any disasters – Shepard would be awake in a few hours' time.

She'd sent out two comms at that point. One to Captain Anderson, informing him that his Commander was likely to be awake soon, and a second letting Lieutenant Alenko know that Shepard seemed to be on the mend and headed for a full recovery. The latter wasn't technically allowed, and _definitely_ not part of policy, but Chakwas had been serving with soldiers to know when to ignore the rules and when to stick to them.

This explained why Kaidan was sitting on a portable chair in the med bay while Anderson paced back and forth in front of her desk.

For the last forty five minutes.

She was about to order them both out of the medbay when Kaidan's hesitant voice called out from the back of the medical bay. "Chakwas? Doctor Chakwas? I think she's waking-"

He was interrupted by the sound of the lightweight medical bay beds rocking on its locked casters and the all-too-familiar retching of some poor soul attempting to evacuate an empty stomach. She sighed and tapped her terminal, ordering the small cleaning bot to police the mess on the floor of the room.

* * *

Shepard's head spun, her ears vaguely recognizing Kaidan's voice calling for the doctor. She shuddered before wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, and grimacing at the trail of slime she left on it.

She felt _miserable._

"You had us worried, Commander," Chakwas' soothing voice called from the doorway. "How are you feeling?"

Shepard spared enough energy to glare at the doctor before grabbing the small proffered cup of water. She swished the first half around her mouth, spitting it on the med bay floor before swallowing the second half.

Chakwas scowled.

"Like the morning after shore leave," Shepard said with a groan, passing the empty cup back.

Truth be told, she'd only been really drunk _once,_ and not in the military. It wasn't that it turned her into something she didn't like – it was that it let other people see in her something _they_ didn't like, and that wasn't something she liked to advertise.

That wasn't to say she was unfamiliar with the partying that soldiers did on leave. If she had a credit for the number of times she'd had to ignore the obvious miserable hangovers that her men and women were suffering from the morning after leave, well... she couldn't _quite_ retire, but it would be close.

"How long was I out?" she asked.

"About fifteen hours," Chakwas said, tapping a button on her data slate. "Something happened down there with the beacon, Commander."

Shepard bit off a flippant _no shit_ as Kaidan stepped away from the wall. "It's my fault," he said flatly. "I must have triggered some kind of security field when I approached it. If you hadn't gotten me out of the way..." he trailed off and shook his head. "I can't throw down like you can, ma'am. It would have killed me."

She waved a dismissive hand at the guilt-ridden lieutenant. "Don't worry about it," she said. "What happened to the beacon?"

She was fairly certain it had been destroyed, either by her hand or by coincidence, but she was in the unpleasant position of not trusting her mind. Not completely, at least. Until she figured out _exactly_ what had happened, she was going to double check _everything._

"The beacon exploded," Kaidan said with a sigh. "System overload after your assault on it, maybe. The blast knocked you cold. Williams and I had to carry you back here to the ship."

"Thanks," she said, and took a deep breath before looking Chakwas in the eye. "What's the damage, doc?"

Chakwas looked down tapped a button on her slate. "Physically, nothing serious. Severe hypoglycemia from biotic overuse, a mild concussion from the blast, and contusions from landing. Get some food to replenish your liver and you'll be fine."

"Mentally..." she pursed her lips and lifted her gaze to Shepard. "It's hard to tell," she admitted at last. "I detected some unusual brain activity, but I'm not sure how much of that was due to the beacon and how much was due to..." she glanced at Kaidan, "pre-existing conditions," she said euphemistically.

Kaidan blinked in confusion at the two, and Shepard waved him off again. "Don't worry about it," she said. "Advantages."

"Ah," Kaidan said. "I won't pry."

"Well, Commander? Anything you want to report?" she tapped the slate expectantly.

Shepard scowled slightly. "I saw..." she shook her head. "I'm not sure what I saw," she lied easily. "Put it down as unsettling dreams for now," she ordered.

Chakwas nodded and scribbled a note on the slate. "Nightmares. I'll make a note," she said. "It may- Oh, Anderson!" she looked up as the door to the medical bay hissed open.

"Doctor Chakwas," he said warmly as he walked up to the bed. "How's our XO holding up?"

"The readings look normal enough," she said. "A bit of rest and some food and the commander should be fine."

"Glad to hear it. Shepard, I need to speak with you – in private," he said, with a meaningful glance at Kaidan and Chakwas.

Kaidan saluted. "Aye aye, Captain. I'll be in the mess if you need me," he said and walked for the door.

Chakwas nodded at Anderson, then looked at Shepard. "As long as you take it easy, there's no reason you can't be moving around," she said. "I brought down a clean uniform for you. It's on the shelf next to your bed."

"Thanks, doc," Shepard said. Truth be told, she wanted a shower more than pants, although that could wait until after the debriefing.

As Chakwas took her leave, Anderson leaned against the wall with a tired sigh. "Sounds like that beacon hit you pretty hard, Commander. You sure you're okay?"

She snorted. "I hit it harder."

He chuckled. "I don't doubt it."

A thought niggled at her. "What happened to Gunnery Chief Williams?"

She swore that the captain looked _sheepish_ at the question. "I asked that she be reassigned to the Normandy. We need a replacement for Jenkins, and her unit's gone, so..."

Shepard raised her eyes in surprise. That was a bit fast for a reassignment, even for the captain of a vessel like the Normandy.

"Well, her reassignment has been requested, and she's on board in the meantime," he admitted.

"Ah." That made more sense.

"We need a replacement for Jenkins, Commander, and from what Alenko said I think she's competent enough," he said, a bit defensively.

Shepard shook her head. "I don't disagree with you, sir. She seemed good to me, as well."

"Oh," he said.

Shepard kicked the covers on her bed off, eliciting an alarmed beep from the scrubber bot working the floor. She half slid, half fell out of bed, catching herself on the armrest with a grunt.

Anderon grabbed her other arm and lifted her to her feet. "Take it easy, Shepard. There's no rush."

She nodded her appreciation at the man – she _hated_ being this weak – and reached for the shelf that had her uniform on it. "You wanted to see me in private, sir?" she asked, pulling her hospital gown off and tossing it in the disposal bin in the corner before reaching her undergarments.

Anderson's reflection in the polished steel bulkhead shook its head – whether at her blasé attitude toward his presence while she dressed or at what he was about to discuss, she didn't know.

The distorted reflection backed against the wall again and leaned against it. "I won't lie to you, Shepard, things look bad. Nihlus is dead, the beacon was destroyed and the geth are invading. The council's going to want answers. So is the alliance."

"I'll cooperate with any investigation they care to mount," she said as she settled a pair of plain panties into place on her waist. "I will _not_ be shot for being the bearer of bad news, however."

In the shined shelf, she saw Anderson begin pacing back and forth. "I'll stand behind you and your report, Shepard. You're a damned hero in my books, especially after that stunt with the nukes at the spaceport." He sighed. "But that's not why I'm here. It's Saren, that other turian. I know him. He hates humans."

Shepard shrugged. Lots of people hated humans. She didn't like it, of course. Machiavelli was many things, but a fool was not one of them, and his line regarding fear and love remained true to this day... especially the final piece, which most people had an irritating tendency to forget:

"_It is important above all to avoid being hated."_

Shepard worked hard to prevent people from hating humans, but the fact of the matter was that there were still people, powerful people, who hated humanity. She would try to change that, but for now, she simply had to accept that some people would hate her for what she was.

Anderson ignored her accepting shrug and continued on. "But Saren has allied himself with the geth. I don't know how. I don't know why. I only know it had something to do with that beacon."

Shepard pulled a shirt over her head and turned to face him, tugging it down as he stopped pacing to look her in the eye. "You were there just before the beacon exploded. Did you see anything? Any clue that might tell us what Saren was after?"

She stopped dressing and leaned back against the shelf, folding her arms._ Now the captain gets to decide whether to institutionalize me or not, _she thought ruefully.

"The protheans..." she began, for once at loss for the best way to describe something. "... didn't communicate like we did, apparently. The beacon gave me a _vision: _Images. Sounds. Sensations."

"A vision?" Anderson asked skeptically. "A vision of what?"

"I saw..." she glanced at the deck, racking her brain. "Synthetics. Geth, maybe. Slaughtering people. Butchering them. Also... I saw that ship. The big one that we saw on the flight in. And... I saw corpses. Walking around, covered in sparks."

"We need to report this to the council," Anderson said slowly, and Shepard laughed bitterly.

"What are we going to tell them?" she scoffed. "That I had a bad dream? Everything I saw could be waved away as stress or nightmares from the Alliance's pet psychopath," she said bitterly.

Anderson shook his head vehemently. "We don't know what information was stored in that beacon. Lost prothean technology? Blueprints for some ancient weapon of mass destruction? Whatever it was, Saren took it."

_There's definitely something going on with Anderson and Saren,_ Shepard thought to herself. _I reveal that the ship that attacked Eden Prime might have been built by the people that destroyed the protheans, and he focuses on some turian?!_

"But I know Saren. I know his reputation, his politiucs. He believes humans are a blight on the galaxy. This attack was an act of war!" Anderson nearly shouted, his face reddening as he resumed his pacing back and forth across the medical bay. "He has the secrets from the beacon. He has an army of geth at his command. And he won't stop until he's wiped humanity from the face of the galaxy!"

Shepard shrugged. "So get your friends to mark him as a 'person of interest' in the attack on Eden Prime and I'll kill him for 'resisting arrest,'" Shepard suggested. "We've done it before."

Anderson deflated slightly. "It's... not that easy," he admitted. "He's a Spectre. He can go anywhere, do almost anything. That's why we need the Council on our side."

"Oh, great. So he's a Spectre. You realize how bad this is going to look, right?" she said, and he nodded. "Well, as long as you know."

She tilted her head in thought. "Did either Alenko's or my helmet cams survive?" she asked.

Anderson blinked at the non sequitor. "I believe so. Why? Did you have evidence that Saren was behind this?"

She nodded. "We found a smuggler on Eden Prime who saw Saren kill Nihlus, and identified them both by name." She tapped the side of her jaw thoughtfully. "He's also likely the source of the leak, so you'll probably want to pull him in regardless," she suggested.

Anderson's eyes gleamed. "Excellent! Have Alenko edit that footage together into something presentable. I'll contact our ambassador on the citadel, see if he can get us an audience with the Council."

He brought up his omni tool and checked the time. "The relief force from Arcturus should be here shortly," he said. "As soon as they get here, we'll head out. Put some pants on and get that data to Alenko, we're going to be on the citadel in no more than twelve hours and I want to be fully prepped by then."

He spun on his heel and headed for the hatch. "Aye aye, Captain," Shepard called after him.

As she pulled the pants of her uniform up and buttoned them, she smiled to herself. She was glad she hadn't burned any bridges over the Spectre nomination yet. If she was right... and if she wasn't insane... then she very might need the powers that they offered.

Destruction was coming to the galaxy. If Saren truly _had_ managed to find a way to control the geth... if he actually _did_ possess a vessel built by the people that killed the protheans... if he really _did _hate humans as much as Anderson claimed... then if she wanted any future in the galaxy at all, she would need to fight him.

Fight him like she'd never fought before.

It was going to be a _glorious_ challenge.

Assuming, of course, that she wasn't completely insane.

She would have to have that discreetly double checked that when they reached the citadel.

* * *

_Next up: A little bit more on the Normandy, then the citadel!_

_I was always a little confused why Shepard just so blindly accepted the "vision" from the prothean beacon as truth. The citadel will have an extra side mission or two exploring why she's confident about it... although she's still not going to be stupid enough to go claiming that the reapers are real without a lick of solid evidence before the citadel council._

_Lastly, as we're moving out of the "only one story path available" part of the game, I thought I'd mention that I don't plan on adhering to strict game chronology in any part of this story. In the original game, for example, Shepard can't do some missions until after going through a certain number of plot worlds. In this story, side-quests on the citadel (or elsewhere) will happen in the order that feels appropriate._

_Shepard will still follow most of the same arcs. Just don't be surprised if some side missions happen sooner or later than is normally possible in the game._


	15. Chapter 15

_**Very** short chapter this time. Wanted to clear up the Eden Prime aftermath so that we could get to the citadel, which is probably going to be similar in length to the Eden Prime mission, although hopefully done in much less time._

* * *

"Shepard, I'm glad to see that you're okay," Kaidan's soft voice said as she stepped out of the medical bay. "Losing Jenkins was... hard on the crew and, well," he blushed slightly. "I'm glad we didn't lose you, too."

She bit back the snappish remark about idiots getting themselves killed for no reason and gave as sympathetic a smile as she could manage with her headache. "Yeah," she said. "It's rough. I'm not looking forward to telling his parents."

Kaidan winced. "That's right, they lived on Eden Prime, didn't they?"

She nodded, and immediately regretted the motion. "Farmers, he said."

"Then they may have made it out," he said with a sigh. "Well, it's been a hell of a shakedown cruise. Our first mission ends with one Spectre killing another."

"You heard that?" she asked with a raised eyebrow, and he rubbed his booted toe on the deck sheepishly. "Remind me to tell Anderson that the med bay isn't as sound-proof as he thinks it is," she said with a glower.

"Uh, aye aye, ma'am," he said. "Still..."

"Hm?" she grunted, rubbing her temples.

"Just thinking. Citadel council is _not_ going to be happy about that. Probably use it to lever more concessions out of the Alliance," he said, half to himself.

She furrowed her brows. _I keep forgetting that he's smarter than he looks,_ she thought to herself. "You seem pretty knowledgeable," she commented, keeping her voice casual. "You a career man?"

He nodded. "I'm an L2 biotic. We're not restricted, but we sure as hell don't go unregistered. Might as well get a paycheck for it. Besides, my father served. Made him proud, when I joined up."

He coughed. "Ah... is that why you're here? Because of your parents?"

"I never knew my parents," she said shortly after a moment. "If they wanted to talk to me they could have done so after that mess a few years back. Speaking of scumbags..."

"Ma'am?"

"You remember that smuggler down on Eden Prime?" she asked, pulling her omni-tool's holographic display up.

"The one at the spaceport transit station that you blackmailed into giving you stolen grenades?"

"That's the one," she confirmed. "I need you to pull the stream from our helmet cams and pretty up the part where he talks about Nihlus and Saren,"

He nodded as she punched in the required access codes to the Normandy's computer database. "How pretty?"

"Well," she said with an evil grin, "pretty enough to get the citadel council to open an investigation into their favorite Spectre."

He winced. "Right. How soon?"

She glanced at her chrono. "We leave for the citadel as soon as the relief fleet from Arcturus arrives, so..." she shrugged. "An hour or two?"

He sighed and saluted. "Aye aye, ma'am. I'd better get busy."

* * *

Two hours later, Shepard was sitting at the table in the mess hall with the detritus of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and an after-dinner snack strewn around her place at the table. She'd snagged some of Alenko's migraine medication and taken a shower long enough to bring Chakwas knocking on the door, concerned that she'd passed out.

All in all, she felt at least sixty percent more human, and that made writing the report on the damnable touch-screen keyboard merely frustrating instead of intolerable. She was just adding the finishing touches to it when Ash walked up to the mess table.

"Uh, ma'am?" she asked as she saluted, her voice hesitant.

_Well,_ Shepard thought to herself as she glanced up at the awkward Gunnery Chief_, she cleans up nicely._

"Yes, Chief... Williams, was it?" she asked, setting the slate down and tapping the display lock. "Can I help you?"

Ash dropped her salute. "I just wanted to thank you, ma'am. For, well, saving my a-, er, my hide down there," she said. "I don't think I'd have made it out if you and Lieutenant Alenko hadn't shown up."

Shepard waved the chief to a chair and leaned back in her own. "Ass. Your ass," she corrected with a smile. "And don't worry about it. The brass sort of frowns on commanders letting soldiers die when we can help it."

Ash settled on the bench seat in the mess, her hands folded politely on her lap.

She looked so uncomfortable trying to act formal that Shepard had to work at concealing her smirk. "At ease, Chief," she said. "What's eating you?"

Ash's shoulders immediately dropped. "Is it that obvious, ma'am?"

Shepard nodded apologetically.

"Shit. I mean-" she winced, biting her tongue.

"Chief, last I checked, 'at ease' meant 'at ease.' You just had your unit wiped out, you've been Shanghai'd by a captain with enough medals to armor a small platoon, and nobody's told you anything. I think you're entitled to a little bit of foul language."

Shepard wasn't a psychologist by any stretch of the imagination, but it didn't take a doctorate to figure out that the poor woman was likely completely overwhelmed by what was going on. Hell, Shepard herself was still sorting everything out in her head, and she didn't have any irritating personal attachments to bother her.

"Yeah... I mean, I'm a marine. I've seen friends die before. But my whole unit..." she looked down at the table, shaking her head slowly before looking up again. "And you _never_ get used to seeing dead civilians. Still, it would have been a whole lot worse if you hadn't shown up, ma'am."

"You helped," she said. "We cleared those bombs without about three minutes to spare, remember? If we had to guess our way to the spaceport, those bombs could have easily glassed the colony." _Not to mention the beacon... and if the message in that thing means what I think it does, you might have just helped save the entire galaxy._

_We'll just skip out on mentioning that, though._

"I guess," Ashley said. "I still feel a little guilty being here, though. I heard about Jenkins..."

"He was a good soldier," _lies_ "and will be missed," _more lies_ "but you did well, Williams. The Captain's not one to offer positions out of pity." _even more lies._

_It's a good thing people don't tell the truth more often, _Shepard thought to herself. _If they did, we'd be too busy taking offense at each other to bother inventing fire, let alone discovering spaceflight._

She reached across the table and clapped the woman on the shoulder. "Welcome aboard the Normandy," she said. "I'd give you the full tour, but I've got to get this sent out before we jump."

Ashley looked up, her expression alarmed. "We're leaving? What about Eden Prime?"

"Nobody told you?" Shepard asked, and Ashley shook her head. "We're heading out as soon as the relief force from Arcturus arrives."

"Where are we going?"

Shepard grinned. "Need to go tell the Citadel Council that their poster boy isn't as great as he seems."

* * *

Shepard felt the telltale rush of dizziness as the Normandy's mass effect core powered up from stationkeeping to full. _Relief fleet must have arrived,_ she thought as she gripped the railing on the stairway.

"Hey, Commander," Joker called as she walked up, the cabin windows showing nothing but cloud. "I'm sure we could arrange to move your pillow into the shower if you'd like. Seeing as, yannow, you seem to be taking up residence there and all that,"

Shepard grinned. It had been a surprise at first, but the pilot's gentle (or not so gentle) teasing had grown on her, and she actually enjoyed the verbal sparring matches that had become a staple of their interactions.

"If we used that as a metric, Joker, you ought to be looking into a job as a cameraman for porn instead of piloting," she replied. "At least, if media you leave on the displays here is anything to go by."

"Gotta go for the low-hanging fruit," he said, weakly lifting his arms in exasperation. "You forget to lock your screen _one time_ and nobody lets you hear the end of it, I swear."

"Not when you make it so easy," she said with a chuckle.

"So, Commander, did you come up here for a reason, or just to torment the cripple?"

Her smile faded. "Yeah. What's our ETA to the citadel?"

He glanced down a rapidly scrolling list of numbers. "We're about six hours shifted from citadel time," he said, "so there's not a lot of local traffic. Call it fifteen minutes to the edge of the system and maybe an hour or so until we dock?"

"Right. Thanks, Joker," she said.

"Uhuh," he grunted.

_One last thing to do before I rack out, then_, she thought as she walked down from the cockpit.

* * *

"Sir?" she said, knocking on the doorframe leading to the room that doubled as Anderson's private quarters and his office.

"Come in," the captain's voice called.

"I have the mission report done," she said, lifting the data slate for emphasis. "Figured you might want to give it a read before I put it in the message queue to the Alliance."

He nodded and reached up from the desk to take the slate from her, thumbing through the document. "Pretty sparse report, Commander," he said.

She shrugged. "I'm not about to put conjecture in a mission report. If someone asks what I think, I'll tell them, but with my..." she glanced over her shoulder, making sure nobody was listening, "unique circumstances they prefer if I keep my reports dry."

"I understand," he said with a sigh. "This all looks in order. I'll add it to Alenko's presentation. Hopefully Udina will be able to get us an audience with the Council quickly."

She tilted her head at him. "Is there usually a delay?" she asked, and he responded with a bitter laugh.

"Yes. Months, usually, although emergencies can sometimes make it in with only a weeks' notice, if they're serious enough. The Council is busy. No, our best bet is to try to find someone with an appointment and ask for their slot."

Shepard looked at him incredulously. "And how many bribes will that take?"

"Too many," he said with another sigh. "Udina hates it when I push for things."

He set the slate down on top of several others that were piling up on the corner of his desk. "Thanks for finishing that promptly, Shepard, I know you must be dead on your feet."

She nodded. "If that's all you needed, sir, I'm going to get a nap so I'm on something resembling citadel time."

He rubbed his eyes. "Sounds like a plan," he said. "I'll see you in a few hours, Shepard."

She offered a quick salute. "Yes, sir."

* * *

_Next time: The citadel!_


	16. Chapter 16

_A/N: Long chapter. Summer break! Lots of writing time. Finals done._

_A lot of background here. Sorry if that's not your thing – next chapter (which will be up in a week, tops, yay summer) should be more action-packed. Or at least action-seasoned._

* * *

Shepard was a ruthlessly pragmatic woman.

That didn't mean she was a robot, however. She had her quirks and foibles, her preferences and things that bothered her just like anyone else did. Admittedly, she kept a better lid on them than most, but they were still there.

The same applied to her views on people. There were traits she admired, traits she put up with, and traits that grated on her. Most of them were related to her – after all, she _was_ the most important person in the world to her – but she still respected and disliked others for what they did with their own lives, on the basis of the work required.

Captain Anderson was one such man. She respected his ability to lead, the devotion he carried to his principles, and his persistent idealism in the face of a galaxy that didn't care one whit about what he wanted. It was rare, very rare, to find someone with such a strong set of principles combined with the ability to make them a reality.

He wasn't without his flaws, of course. His obsession, whatever the cause, with the turian Saren was dangerous. Not only, she felt, did it blind him to any possible alternative explanations for what was going on with the geth, the protheans, and the invasion of Eden Prime, but it also made him appear to the other races of the galaxy as a raging lunatic.

Shepard had worked very hard to present a specific image of humanity to the galaxy, and "prone to promoting raging lunatics to positions of command" wasn't one of them.

She was acutely aware of the irony.

Irony or no, the man's obsession was still a problem, just like Pressly's xenophobia. If humanity was to survive the coming centuries – or even the coming months, if her suspicions about the invasion of Eden Prime were correct – it would need far more goodwill than it had managed to garner so far. There were times when threats of violence and the promise of unpredictability were appropriate, but the Systems Alliance had vastly overplayed the "prickly and dangerous" card. Possibly fatally so. One needed carrots as well as sticks.

In addition to the things major flaws the man had, there were also the minor, much more excusable failings. Most of the time, they weren't a problem, but sometimes a lack of foresight on one man's part could result in frantic panic on the part of many others.

Like now, for instance.

Anderson had ordered Shepard to bring Alenko and Williams along to the meeting with the human ambassador and potentially the citadel council. At the time, she hadn't been sure whether to laugh or politely explain why that was a terrible idea. In either case, he hadn't been interested in listening to her arguments, and had sent her off to get the two prepared for a formal meeting with what amounted to the heads of state of the largest nation in the _galaxy_.

She wasn't worried about Alenko. The man had obviously moved in political circles before, and knew how not to step on toes. He also almost certainly had appropriate attire, an understanding of protocol, and a modicum of self-control.

Williams, on the other hand...

She let out a sigh as she walked briskly toward the sleeper pods. She hoped the woman was more resilient than she'd seemed earlier, or this was going to end poorly. She had too much to learn, and nowhere near enough time to learn it in.

* * *

"Williams!" Shepard half-shouted at the occupied sleeper pod. "Up and at 'em!"

Ashley was awake and at least partially responsive in seconds. The sleeper pod hatch opened and a disheveled gunnery chief squinted into the dim lights of the pod bay. "Ma'am?" she asked groggily.

Shepard snapped her fingers on front of the woman's nose. "Time to get up. Anderson wants the ground team from Eden Prime with him when we meet the ambassador," she said. "In an hour."

Ashley blinked twice before swearing. "Oh, _shit,"_ she muttered, flinging a leg over the edge of the pod.

_Credit where it's due_, Shepard thought. _At least she knows it's a bad idea._

"I brought you Lowe's dress blues," Shepard said, handing a neatly-folded stack of navy blue clothing to the chief. "You're borrowing them. Get dressed ASAP and meet me in the comm room."

Williams hopped out of the pod with a thud, rubbing sleep from her eyes with one hand as she reached for the offered pants with the other. "Aye aye, ma'am," she acknowledged.

* * *

Two minutes and thirty seven seconds (Shepard checked), a hastily-dressed and still blinking Gunnery Chief Ashley Willaims stumbled into briefing and communications room behind the CIC.

"Good, you're here," she said without preamble as the door closed behind Ashley. "We're scheduled to meet with Ambassador Donnel Udina in less than an hour an I don't think Anderson thought this through completely."

Ashley smiled weakly. The level of informality – and the frankness that people used to assess the strengths and weaknesses in each other – expressed by the crew was still something she was getting used to, and hearing the executive officer bluntly say that the captain didn't get something would have been heresy in her old unit.

Here, it was treated as a simple fact to be dealt with like any other, with no stigma attached. She definitely liked it, but... old habits were hard to change, and there was a deep sense of institutional _guilt_ that flooded her when she nodded her agreement with the commander.

"Well, we'll do what we can," she said with a sigh. "Now, I mean no offense, but we don't have time to beat around the bush with this and it's important."

"Ma'am?" Ashley steeled herself, bracing for... she wasn't even sure.

"Your last name is Williams," she commented almost casually. "Are you related to _the_ Williams, of Shanxi?"

Ashley's shoulders drooped. She'd been hoping that nobody would make the connection. Evidently, the commander had. "Yes, ma'am. He was my grandfather."

"I see," Shepard said with the same almost irritating lack of inflection. "A lot of people related to the veterans of the first contact war have issues working with aliens. We're going to see the ambassador, possibly the citadel council, and we're going to be encountering and working with a _lot_ of them. Is that going to be a problem?"

Ashley bristled slightly that Shepard thought she would even need to ask the question. "No, ma'am. You tell me to jump, I'll say how high. You tell me to play nice, I'll play nice. You tell me to kiss a turian," she gave the commander a cold smile, "I'll ask which cheek."

Shepard chuckled quietly. "Not sure they have cheeks, Chief, but that's good to hear. Now, your personnel jacket-" she tapped a data slate for emphasis, "-says that you've had mostly groundside postings. Have you ever worked closely with aliens before?"

She scowled, thinking back to her various dirtside assignments. "Aside from an asari tourist or two... no, ma'am," she answered. "Not a lot of traffic on most of my bases."

Shepard let out a long, slow breath. "Then you get the crash course."

She blinked in confusion. "Crash course, ma'am?"

The commander smiled. "Crash course in alien relations," she said. "How to avoid _unintentionally _offending anyone."

_I guess that makes sense. No reason they'd move or think like we do, _Ashley thought as she nodded. "I'm all ears, Commander."

"Right!" Shepard brushed her hands together as she organized her thoughts. "First, diplomatic basics. Speak only when directly spoken to. Salute anything that moves or scowls, or whenever I do."

Ashley nodded. "Same as usual for dealing with politicians?"

"Pretty much. Now, the asari. The big thing about them is to not flip out if they try to touch you. Touch is a big part of asari greetings and communication. The polite ones won't do it to humans, but a large portion of the citadel population is asari, and we might run into some who don't know it's not normal for humans."

"Touch me how, ma'am?"

Shepard shrugged. "It varies. Usually they'll try to run their hands along the side of your face or hair, but another common greeting is for them to lift both of your hands in theirs while stepping close. Here, like this-"

Shepard stepped close to the Ashley, lifting her both of hands just beneath her breasts before lowering them and stepping away. "Like that. It's a little closer than we usually get to strangers, but they mean nothing more to it than we mean by a handshake."

Ashley shook her head. "Why do they do it, ma'am?"

Shepard shrugged again. "My instructor told me it's part of how they pick up on the mood of the person they're greeting, like we read body language. I've never asked beyond that."

"Okay, so don't be alarmed if the blueberries touch me. Anything else?" she asked.

"Aside from not calling them blueberries?" Shepard shook her head. "Little. Asari are hard to accidentally offend, especially the ones working with the public. They have a lot of patience and are fairly empathetic."

"Right, freaky mind stuff."

"More culture than biology, but yes, that plays a role." She put her hands on her hips. "Now, turians."

"Ma'am," Ashley said flatly.

"Turians are very difficult to read," she said. "They do a lot with sub-vocalizations in their speech, positioning of the head and eyes, and the like. We're actually supposed to get a translator patch that helps with some of it soon. Luckily for us," she smiled, "the broad strokes are easy. Don't stare them in the eye or look down on them unless you're trying to challenge them, and bob your head to show deference."

"That's it?"

Shepard snorted. "The OCS offers entire _classes_ on turian body language and social interaction. This is the basics, like 'how to not flip them off in the street, or apologize if you do.'"

"Nod at the turians. Check."

"The volus can be prickly, and they don't take insinuations that they don't contribute well at all. Also, keep a good distance when you talk to them – at least a meter and a half, if not two."

"Because of the suits?" she asked, curious.

"Partially," Shepard said with a nod, "but also because they're short, and they can't look you in the eye if you're looming, and that's important to them."

"Stay back from the volus, don't belittle them. Heh. Belittle," she said with a smirk.

"Pretty much," Shepard said with a roll of her eyes. "Now, the hanar are unerringly polite and considerate, so you're not likely to offend them even if you tried. Just don't touch them."

"Don't touch the jellyfish. Understood."

"And don't call them jellyfish."

"Yes, ma'am."

She smiled. "The elcor... just treat them like you would any human."

"The elcor? The four-legged emotionless ones? Treat them like I would a human?"

Shepard laughed. "They come from a high gravity world, chief. All of their body language is incredibly subtle, and a lot of their communication is scent-based. You can't hide your body language from the elcor, and any of the ones we run into are going to know human tendencies."

"Huh. Okay. I don't have to worry about accidentally offending them?"

Shepard shook her head with a smile. "Not really. They're very patient, not particularly aggressive, and very self-aware. That makes them difficult to offend."

"Understood, ma'am."

"Let's see... we probably won't run into any krogan or batarians on the presidium, so don't worry about them... oh!" she snapped her fingers, "I almost forgot. Don't grin."

Ashley blinked. "Ma'am?"

"Don't grin."

"I can't smile while I'm there?" Ashley said, confused. "Why not?"

"You can smile all you like, chief, just don't _grin._"

Ashley shook her head back and forth. "You'll need to explain that one, ma'am, because I'm not getting it."

Shepard huffed and set her hands back on her hips. "If a wild animal on earth bares its teeth at you, Williams, what emotion is it likely expressing?"

"Well... that depends," Ashley hedged. She had fond memories of a family dog when she was young. "I had a dog..."

Shepard waved her hand dismissively. "If you come across a wild creature in the woods, and it bares its teeth at you, do you think it's pleased or angry?"

"Angry."

"Same logic. Of the known sentient species in the galaxy, guess how many openly bare their teeth as an expression of happiness or pleasure?"

"I couldn't say, ma'am."

"Three. Humans, batarians, and krogan. Don't grin. Most of the people on the presidium will understand the expression, but some might not, and among other races it's reserved for an expression of rage, not enjoyment. So keep your mouth shut, Chief. Literally."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Good." she glanced at her omni tool and sighed in frustration. "There's more to cover, but I still need to get geared up and Alenko's busy with the captain. This will have to do," she said, clapping the other woman on the shoulder.

"Yes, ma'am," Ashley repeated, then scowled. "Er... geared up?"

Shepard let her hand fall and laughed. "I forget you're not used to working with Vanguards," she said as she headed for the door. "We're _always_ armed and armored. Go finished getting prepped, Williams."

"Aye aye, ma'am," Ashley said as Shepard walked through the hatch.

_Great,_ she wondered in the empty room as she straightened her uniform, _but what the hell is a vanguard?_

* * *

Between the written reports from the ground team, the video presentation that Alenko had been working on, the sensor logs from the Normandy, and the corpse of Nihlus, there should have been plenty of evidence to implicated this... _Saren_... in the attack on Eden Prime.

At least, that's what Ashley figured.

Which was why she was more than a little confused at her presence among Anderson, Shepard, and Alenko in the Normandy's decontamination airlock waiting for the sterilization field to sweep across them for the umpteenth time.

She was a good soldier, she reminded herself. She fought hard, didn't question orders, and when told to jump, she asked how high. Still, she couldn't figure out why she was in borrowed dress blues being taken to a meeting with humanity's seniormost diplomat to the citadel council, along with one of the most skilled human biotics, a famous war hero, and an _infamous_ war hero.

Yes, she had been on Eden Prime when the attack came. No, she didn't have the first clue what had happened. Yes, she'd fought against the geth with the Commander and Lieutenant. No, she didn't have an explanation for the zombies. Yes, she had seen the dead body of the Spectre. No, she was _sure_ she didn't know what was going on, and hadn't they already asked her that question?

She bit back a sigh as her imagination ran rampant.

A muttered curse snapped her out of her mental rut as Shepard tugged on her assault rifle's back mount.

"Chief?" The N7's voice was resigned. "Can you get this damnable thing a shove? The armor doesn't let me bend far enough to to lock it in place, and it's stuck."

"Of course, ma'am," she said and began working the folded rifle into its latched position. "Do you mind if I ask you a question?" she said to Shepard's backside as she wiggled the rifle back and forth against the jammed latch.

"Go ahead," Shepard said as she held on to the airlock wall to brace herself.

"You said earlier that you were in full gear because you were a Vanguard. What's a Vanguard?"

"It's- _oof,_" she grunted as her grip slipped and half fell against the wall when Ashley pushed on the rifle. "Alenko, you mind fielding this one? Chief's trying to shove me out the airlock," she joked, and Williams blushed.

"Of course, ma'am," Kaidan said from the opposite wall as Williams sheepishly pulled Shepard upright. "Chief, Vanguard is one of the six specializations that the ICT program members pick from when they finish their first advanced training courses. It's sort of like another MOS."

He folded one arm across his chest, gesturing with the other as he slipped easily into the lecturer's role. "Each specialization – call it a class – has its own set of training doctrines, combat scenarios, and preferred equipment."

Ashley gave up trying to finesse Shepard's shotgun into its mount and gave the weapon a swift slam, shoving it into place with a loud click. Shepard leaned away from the wall and nodded her thanks.

"Vanguards are the front line," she interrupted. "We're all strong biotics, although not necessarily the most precise ones. We're the first in the door, and our standard MO is to disrupt lines of battle, destroy high priority targets, and keep an enemy force off balance. We sow chaos, fear, panic, and confusion in addition to blowing things up," she finished with a predatory grin.

"I get the whole shock and awe thing, ma'am, but that still doesn't explain the armor," Ashley said, feeling a little bit like the kid in school that everyone made fun of for not getting a simple concept. "I mean, unless you're expecting trouble..."

"I'm always expecting trouble," Shepard replied in a dry echo of Nihlus' earlier remark. "But that's not why I wear armor everywhere. Tell me, Chief, what's the job of a soldier?"

"Ma'am? I suppose it's to kill the enemy," she answered doubtfully, and Anderson smiled.

"Close," Shepard corrected. "It's to _neutralize_ the enemy. You don't need to kill them to do that."

Ashley raised an eyebrow. "Fair enough, ma'am, but how many chances do you really get to accept surrender?"

"Frankly?" Shepard shook her head. "If you're fighting right, quite a few."

She pushed off the wall and gestured past Anderson to the closed airlock door. "Out there are hundreds of thousands of aliens and humans, sentient creatures like you and me, living together in relative harmony. They come from different worlds, different religions, different philosophies, and yet almost all of them have something in common: They don't like dying."

"We can take advantage of this."

"A concealed pistol or compact service rifle lets me kill people. A full battle kit lets me _show_ people that I kill people. It delivers a message that a concealed weapon doesn't. My identity and reputation – and the reputation of the people that share my uniform – is as much a weapon as the guns I carry or the powers I wield. Sometimes, if I'm lucky, I can end a fight simply by making my presence known... and an enemy that won't fight is an enemy I don't have to kill."

She paused, letting her words sink in. "And an enemy I don't have to kill is one fewer friend, or comrade, or family member that will come hunt me down later."

"So that's why, Williams," she said as she patted the arsenal strapped to her back, "I wear full kit whenever I go anywhere public. Make sense?"

"I guess," Ashley said doubtfully, "but-"

The airlock chimed, and Anderson slapped the door panel open almost immediately.

"Finally," he said as he stomped out. "Let's go. I don't want to miss our appointment."

* * *

"Captain Anderson," Donnel Udina's desert-dry voice said as the four of them stepped inside the ambassador's office on the presidium, "I see you brought half your crew with you."

"Just the ground team from Eden Prime," Anderson demurred, "in case you had any questions."

"I _have_ the mission reports," he shot back. "I assume they're accurate?"

Anderson nodded curtly. "They are. What about the council? What did they say?"

Udina's face softened, and he sat down heavily in his padded office chair. "They cannot comment on an ongoing investigation," he said with an explosive sigh.

"So they are investigating," Anderson said, triumph in his voice.

"They are," Udina confirmed slowly. "Unfortunately, it takes more than hearsay and spotty evidence for them to toss meetings that have been scheduled months in advance out to formally hear our claims," he said finished bitterly.

"But the evidence-" Anderson began, and Udina slammed his fist into the desk, cutting him off.

"-Is not enough!" he spat. "The badly edited testimony of some two-bit smuggler from a helmet cam? The corpse of a spectre shot in the back of the head? Mission reports from a whole _three _soldiers, all of them members of your crew? The beacon destroyed? You're lucky they can't deny the evidence of the geth attack, or they'd be hauling you all up there on a list of charges longer than the bloody _station!_"

"What?!" Anderson thundered, slicing his hand through the air. "That's ridiculous."

"Eden Prime was a chance to prove you get the job _done, _Anderson! Instead, we get this. Wild accusations about the Council's top agent from someone with a history with him, a Spectre dead, and the mission a failure. Nihlus' recommendation or no, this will seriously jeopardize your candidacy for the Spectres, Commander. "

"That's Saren's fault, not hers," Anderson protested.

"Then you'd better hope the C-Sec investigation turned up evidence to support your claims," Udina snapped back.

He sighed and rubbed his temple before glancing at his desk clock. "I scheduled a teleconference with them in a gap between their next meetings," he said in a calmer tone. "Anderson, you're the one with the accusations," _and as a result, _Shepard thought, _the one taking the fall if they turn out to be unfounded. Clever ambassador. _"so I want you there, and I have some things to discuss with you before the meeting."

He glanced meaningfully at the trio of soldiers, and Anderson sighed. "The three of you, dismissed," he said. "Don't get into trouble, and keep your commlinks on."

Shepard snapped a salute and silently left the office, Alenko and Williams trailing behind.

* * *

"And _that_ is why I don't like politicians," Ashley muttered under her breath as the door hissed shut behind the pair.

"It doesn't make him wrong," Kaidan said to her. "Look, I'm not a fan of the man myself, but you have to admit he's got a point. If your goal is to not listen, there are holes in our evidence you could fly a shuttle through that will justify it."

"I- dammit," Ashley swore. "What now, Commander?"

Shepard paused, running over options in her head.

None of them were good.

She shook her head. "Udina's right," she said. "We're relying on a C-Sec investigation to turn up evidence of wrongdoing to get a hearing. C-Sec answers to the council, and is bound by their rules. They'll turn up whatever results the council wants."

"That's an awfully cynical view of C-Sec, ma'am," Kaidan said.

She shrugged. "They don't have much of a choice. All the council needs to say is 'that's classified' and C-Sec won't be able to do anything."

"Bastards," Ashley muttered.

"Easy, Chief," Shepard said, placing a hand on the woman's shoulder. "Look, you're both time lagged to hell. Go catch some shuteye in the lounge. You'll be on hand if Anderson or Udina needs you, and you'd be hard pressed to get in trouble napping."

Kaidan brightened at the suggestion, rubbing his neck. "That's right, they have a lounge here, don't they."

Ashley shifted from foot to foot, ducking out from under Shepard's hand. "Is it going to be a problem, ma'am? I mean..."

Shepard shook her head. "It's meant as a quiet place for visiting dignitaries that need a break. Nobody will think twice of two officers catching a nap on the couches. You didn't have fifteen hours of shuteye in the medical bay," she reminded them with a wry grin.

"Plus," she said, gesturing at her armor and guns, "do you think anyone is really going to want to start trouble with _me?"_

"Point, ma'am," Ashley murmured. "What are you going to do?"

"I have a few errands I need to run while I'm here. You have the frequency and encryption code?"

"Yes, ma'am," she answered. "Alenko gave it to me."

"Good man," Shepard said with a nod at the Lieutenant. "Now go get some rest, both of you. I'll be back in an hour or two."

* * *

For all the Commander Shepard was clever – more clever than most – she was still quite poorly educated. Growing up on the street without spending more than a few weeks in a classroom before joining the military did that to a person.

Her remarkable command of the English language stemmed from long days taking shelter in the local public library as a child, and what few other formal skills she had were taught to her by the remedial course the Systems Alliance had put her through.

The course was interesting in that didn't try to replace fifteen years' worth of classical education in the school system. Rather, it aimed to teach her enough to not appear an idiot in public while showing her where to go to find out specific things if the need ever arose. Usually, when in the military, this boiled down to "ask a specialist."

In the wider world, it was slightly more complicated.

_First step: Define and analyze the problem._

After making sure that Kaidan and Ashley weren't following her, she hopped on board a public transit system.

_I need to find out if the images in my head are hallucinations caused by a blow to the head, or really a message planted by the protheans._

_Second step: Develop a plan to solve the problem._

That narrowed the field down considerably. The blow to the head and hallucination aspect meant she probably needed a medical professional of some kind, or at the very least somebody with a lot of experience with traumatic brain injuries.

_Alternatively,_ she thought as she tapped her finger against her jaw, _I could approach it from the other side. This cannot have been the only communication beacon left behind by the protheans, and some record of their function must have been recorded elsewhere._

So. Two solutions, then. She could find a medical examiner with a limited curiosity who wouldn't be missed if she asked too many questions or risked talking... or she could try looking up more information on the protheans.

Not really much of a choice.

_Third: Implement the plan._

She stepped off the mass transit shuttle and looked up at the high glass walls of the citadel public library with an anticipatory smile.

* * *

It was definitely a classy library, she thought as she stepped up to the polished front desk staffed by not one but three real librarians. Most of the libraries she'd been in had a reference librarian and a security guard.

Of course, this was a far cry from the run-down old building she'd hidden from the rain in as a child.

"Hello," she said with a friendly smile as she walked up to the front desk. The armor and weaponry she carried were a double-edged sword, lending an tense undertone to even friendly conversations.

"Hello, miss," the asari at the desk said politely. "How may I help you?"

"It's my first time here in the citadel library," she explained to the librarian, "and I'm trying to get some information on the protheans."

The asari smiled, her shoulders dipping slightly as the tension that had been in them faded. "That's a fairly broad topic. Is there a specific aspect you're interested in?"

Shepard nodded. "I'm trying to find details on prothean communication systems. What they used in place of our comm buoys, how they send messages, things like that."

The asari called up several new holographic terminals, tapping a few commands into each one before looking back up at Shepard while the query was processed. "And who are you with, miss?" she asked.

"Nobody; this is for my own edification," she said. That sentence alone conveyed more meaning than Shepard would have preferred, but at least here on the citadel it was common for newcomers to ask about the protheans.

More importantly, however, it also indicated that she didn't have research paper access through any corporate or educational institution, and that results from the various scholarly journals would not be useful.

"I see," the asari said, flicking several of the windows closed. "I'm afraid that most of the advanced studies and articles are restricted," she said apologetically. "If you want access to them, you'll need a license with appropriate access tokens."

Shepard waved a hand back and forth. "The summaries should be enough to get me started," she said. "If I need more detailed information, I can always pay the one-time access fee."

"Of course," the librarian said, tapping another button before handing her a small data drive. "Just plug this in to any open terminals, it will call up some good works to get you started on."

Shepard took the small chip with a polite nod of the head. "Thank you."

"Let me know if you run into any issues, and welcome to the citadel library."

* * *

Two hours later, Shepard was _thoroughly_ tired of reading through summaries of academic papers.

It was bad enough that she had to constantly cross-reference to works and papers that she didn't have access to, but not having spent a decade or more of her life in the academic world slowed what should have been a quick search to a crawl.

It didn't help matters that most of the papers were dedicated around adapting prothean technology – which apparently everyone in the field already understood the function of – to new purposes, or studying the effects it had, or offering suggestions as to its purpose.

Nobody bothered to list what any of it actually _did_.

She rubbed her eyes. _What I really need, _she thought blearily to herself, _is a prothean primer._ _Wait, hold on..._

She stopped scrolling past the articles whose complete contents were available to the public. Usually, these pieces were worth about as much as one paid for them – which is to say, nothing – but the title on the paper caught her eye.

_Mechanisms and functionality of prothean communication network terminals, by Dr. Liara T'Soni._

She didn't recognize the name, although it sounded asari. She downloaded the paper and began reading through it. _Credentials, authors... only one author? That's not a good sign, _she thought, her excitement waning. _Contents, preamble, data, diagrams... come on, where's the detailed summary... ah, there it is..._

"_While no functioning samples of long-range prothean communication relays have been discovered, the damaged systems recovered in the cache on Nonuel have all but proven that the protheans must have possessed some kind of technology to transfer information without a typical user interface, possibly by a precise system of transcranial magnetic stimulation or other 'experience transfer' mechanism. Analysis of the replacement parts discovered by Doctor Batua Atan Swa Taroo Eadi Tol Soonarin indicates..."_

The pit fell out of Shepard's stomach.

It was _real._

It wasn't – at least not entirely – the deranged imaginings of an impact-battered mind. The protheans _had_ left behind a message in their beacon, and it _had_ been transmitted, at least partially, to her. On the wake of the surprisingly relieving reassurance that she was not, in fact, losing her mind came a sense of dawning horror at the scope of the problem before her.

There was a turian who had apparently turned traitor, working toward unconfirmed ends, flying around in a ship built by the race that the protheans left behind an apocalyptic warning about. His methods were ruthless, his final goal unknown, and his allies profoundly unsettling.

_Still, better to know... _Shepard thought to herself as she downloaded a local copy of the doctor's paper and signed out of the terminal and headed for the door.

"You were reading a long time," the librarian from earlier called to her as she passed by the front desk. "Did you find what you were looking for?"

Shepard smiled and handed the carefully-blanked reference chip back to the librarian. "I did, thank you. The summaries for those papers can be a bit of a slog to read through."

The asari took the chip, nodding sympathetically. "Especially if you're unaccustomed to it. I'm glad you found what you were looking for."

"Me, too," Shepard said. _Although if you knew what my success meant, you'd probably want to throw a few extra prayers to your goddess_.

She walked out of the library, already tapping her omnitool for a cab.

* * *

She had scarcely settled in the front seat when her omni-tool beeped, a soft chime alerting her to an incoming call. She glanced at the identifier.

_Systems Alliance Ambassador Donnel Udina, Citadel Embassies, Building 3_

She tapped the "accept" button.

"This is Shepard," she answered tersely.

"Commander," the ambassador's tinny voice replied in kind. "The C-Sec investigation's finished. You need to meet us at the tower."

She sighed into the comm. "No investigation ever finishes that fast," she said.

"You think I don't know that?" he snapped. "Get to the tower quickly. I've already called Williams and Alenko up. A C-Sec investigator will meet you with his results."

She quirked an involuntary eyebrow. "We don't get time to review the findings?" she asked.

"Don't remind me. I have to go brief Anderson. Move fast."

She sighed as the call terminated, and punched a new destination into the cab's navigational computer.

* * *

"-investigation is over, Garrus," Shepard's translator supplied with a warning beep that sound levels were too low for a guarantee of accuracy. The deeper-voiced turian stalked off without a word, not even glancing at Shepard as he passed.

"Commander Shepard?" he asked with a polite bob of the head, "Garrus Vakarian. I was the officer in charge of the C-Sec investigation into Saren."

Shepard returned the nod. "Did you find anything we can present to the council?" she asked.

He shook his head. "No. He's a Spectre. Everything he touches is classified or so heavily redacted it might as well be. I've got nothing susbstantial. He's slimy, though... I know he did it. Like you humans say, I can feel it in my gut."

Shepard resisted the urge to roll her eyes at the turian. "Gut feelings" didn't exactly get one very far in a bureaucracy that was dead set on _not_ letting you proceed. Still, it was a turian that thought outside the box, which was a rarity – at least in her experience. Even Nihlus had been a fairly by-the-book character from what she had seen, and him from an organization of supposedly unconventional thinkers.

She instead nodded politely and filed away his contact information, listening to his promises to call her if he turned up anything on his own time.

"Commander!" Kaidan's voice called from an alcove on the side. "There you are. The council's ready for us."

* * *

_Next: The citadel council meeting, and the hunt for more evidence. Probably two chapters, given that my hunt ties in a few extra side quests that the original doesn't. This is a good (albeit cliffhangeresque) stopping point for now._

_After that, it's Spectre time, and then out into the greater galaxy!_

_Side note – I may be getting a beta soon! Talks are ongoing. Hopefully this will lead to an increase in quality and a decrease in errors. As always, feedback is welcome, and I'm not offended in the slightest if you correct my mistakes. One of these days I'll even fix them!_


End file.
